


Balance Wheel

by actinide



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Child Abuse, Earth C (Homestuck), Fictional Religion & Theology, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Not Epilogue Compliant, Post-Canon, Reincarnation, Unrelated Striders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-31
Updated: 2020-05-31
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:16:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 22,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24462631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/actinide/pseuds/actinide
Summary: The beginning and end of your kindness is David Strider.It was always going to be like this, you think.Two incarnations of two separate people find each other, then lose each other.
Relationships: Dave's Bro | Beta Dirk Strider/Dirk's Bro | Alpha Dave Strider
Kudos: 25





	1. mainspring

**Author's Note:**

> Please do not look at me I should not be writing this right now I literally don't have the time  
> Set in an Earth-C universe, thousands of years after the game is over.  
> If this feels familiar, it's probably a coincidence. Trash romance novel but with a bad ending.  
> This predated the whole uhhh epilogue experience. I'm not including any factors from them or any fan content currently being produced by wp or anyone else.

You are six years old the first time you take the city bus alone.

You weren’t supposed to, you know that, because there are strangers that ride the bus, and because you were supposed to be in school, you were supposed to do a lot of things, but your classmates are stupid and the teachers are boring and you remember thinking, _If I explain this all to mom, she’ll understand why I couldn’t stay._

You wouldn’t tell your father. There’s no point arguing with him.

But you’re six years old and you are lost and you get off the bus in the west hive collective, edge of Odessa, where the Barkbeast Desert starts and the planted trees give way to scrubland and flat flat flat for as far as the eye can see.

It’s not quite Holy Week, still twelve days to go, but the decorations are being strung through the trees already, and the sun cooks you at 80 degrees in the shade. You walk through groups of trolls and humans, a couple stray ‘diles and iguanas that don’t mind the heat so much, and you keep going until you can see the pink blossoming across your skin like a desert rose.

It is the first time, you will remember, in scattered shards and broken pieces, you’d ever been inside a Time Temple. You will remember the mosaics, the singing quartz and a troll emblazoned in the glass, draped in red, the sign of death, the ruby red of her eyes, hair like a bramble bush. Remember reaching out and touching the cog upon her chest, just barely in your reach, and feeling sad. You will remember someone taking your hand, remember the curve of her horns and the way she looks at you, sad, pity you can’t read yet, at your age, and that her hands are warm, but dry. No one had ever held your hand so warm like that.

She says “You’re lost,” like a divine truth, mouth curving over the consonants like they’re too soft for her, foreign. You’ve never heard anyone talk like that before, and won’t again for many years. She squeezes your hand gentle, tugs you up from under the pew where you hide, and she says, “Let’s get you home.”

You don’t remember if you said yes, or if you said no, and you don’t remember getting there, don’t remember her walking you anywhere, or taking a bus. You don’t really remember anything, after that moment.

You do remember being ten, the first time you really got hurt, the first time someone really hurt you. Remember sitting at the bottom of the stairs while your parents argued inside (and they never felt like your parents, not really, not the way TV or movies portrayed them, even if your mom had the same white hair, even if your dad’s stuck up on the sides just like yours on a good day). You remember wiping at your cheeks, even the one that hurt, and thinking how dry your eyes were, how normal people must cry when they’re hurt, how they always cry on the television, how your hands were shaking, but you weren’t scared. You remember thinking there was something to that feeling in your chest, tight, angry, how unfair it all felt. How stupid. What was the point of a god of Fortune when you had such bad luck?

There is no concrete moment you remember feeling like a bad person, like you deserved any of it. There is no monumental circumstance that leads you to the conclusion that you are not destined for happiness.

But you think there is a moment where you decided it didn’t matter, and that there was no reason for you fight for that place of good anymore. There was a kindness inside you, once upon a time, and you are certain, more certain than anything, that that kindness began and ended, as many things do, with a boy.

You meet David on your first day of high school, first period pre-calculus, in your brand new uniform, shirt still creased under your sweater, pants stiff and starched against your skin. You worked hard to get here, skipped two grades, and you take no offense to the curious stares, the distrustful glances when the teacher does nothing to acknowledge your presence in any meaningful way.

They call his name first, Strider, David, and your head whips around when he says “Here,” right behind you.

You don’t think much of him at first glance, head tucked down, white blonde hair and pale hands that are already doodling commentary on the edge of his syllabus. His left hand smudges as he writes and you marvel at that. It’s the first time you’ve seen anyone move their hands the way you do.

“Strider, Dietrich,” the teacher says next, and kids laugh.

But you’re tired and you ache, wrist still sore, shoulder still bruised, and you sit facing forward, don’t blink, don’t care to bother, and you say, “Present,” and they laugh more.

You don’t turn back around, don’t take your eyes off the board, but you can feel Strider, David, burning holes in the back of your head for the rest of class.

He loses interest immediately following, when you don’t introduce yourself, when you leave class immediately to stand by your locker until your next class, and you probably wouldn’t admit to being relieved. You’ve always had a sense when people were watching you, pinpricks up your spine, tension sitting heavy on your shoulders. It’s as exasperating as it is embarrassing, and it’s not like you’d tell anyone, even if you had anybody to tell. Just makes you sound like a freak. You get that enough at home as is.

Still, you loathe the idea of attention when you’re already an easy target, small in stature and younger than everybody else by at least two years. You sit in the back of class in all periods but first and you don’t raise your hand, not even when you know the answer before the teacher finishes talking. No one likes a precocious little smartass. It’s what got you in trouble at your old school, and you’re not here to make friends. You tested into this school for your intelligence, for its reputation and connection to the specific sect of Light followers who pursue and value knowledge above all else (your father had stared right at you, right through you, when you stood before him, twelve and a half, and told him you’d applied for and passed the test on your own; sharp eyes, your father, shadowed, almost violet, if the light hit them right, and you’re lucky he was impressed, you think, instead of angry).

You’re here to learn and get the FUCK out of this place. Nothing more. You don’t have time to waste.

The problem, you think, with not having friends, is that you avoid the cafeteria like the plague. It’s loud, it’s obnoxious, and full of idiot kids who would distract you while you’re trying to work, but the alternative is almost as bad.

You’re tired of eating behind the portables in less than two weeks into your first month, even though it’s quiet, and relatively nice. The school was built on a hill (not exactly within city limits, and your school commute is a nightmare, but you can’t complain too much), and the new building has been under construction for so long that you doubt you’ll see it to completion before you graduate. The view is quaint, but you’d be happier if you weren’t boiling in your uniform, or you didn’t have to balance your notebook on your knees; you can’t eat and write at the same time, which cuts down on productivity, but you can’t work on it at home so you sit and you manage and you turn in your chicken scratch, get high marks, and don’t complain.

People do prod after you, eventually, but it’s not much of a pain. You know you’re young, you know you’re small. You don’t react when they tease because you don’t need to, they get satisfaction in how you look away, how you keep shuffling along. You don’t need friends. Never have. That’s just how it has to be, and you don’t care. Teenagers (and gods below isn’t it just ridiculous how young you are, haha baby idiot) are cruel to you because they can be, but you get worse at home, don’t you, and after you sprain your wrist, three weeks into your first semester, can no longer balance your tray, your notebook, and your sandwich, you begrudgingly return to the cafeteria.

You have not spoken to Strider, David, once since you began attending this school, but you do notice one specific thing about him: kids avoid him.

They whisper behind his back and trade gossip in the halls, shuffle out of his way and snicker once he’s passed. You can’t bother to ask, nor do you care much to, but you can see that he is disliked, and you’re not entirely sure why. He isn’t ugly, you don’t think, tall and wiry, bad posture and an untidy uniform, hair that sticks up on the side, just like yours, maybe not as bad. He isn’t weird in any way that matters, at least not to you, though he does mumble under his breath during most tests, and the incessant tapping of his pen against his desk can be annoying. You’ve seen him dragging around unassigned books on archaeology (he pulled one out in the middle of class once, and the teacher made him leave), which is more interesting than anything, and you’ve watched him walk to detention fifteen times since the start of September.

So it is no surprise to you to see Strider, David sitting at a table shoved towards the back corner of the cafeteria, just to the left of the janitor’s closet. He sits with an invisible bubble around him, and you’ve seen all the stupid movies, all the shit awful teen dramas, but he’s also at the only otherwise unoccupied table in the room, so you stand up straight, clutch your tray, and make your way over with determination.

He’s got big oversized headphones on, bright candy red, the kind that are more expensive but cancel the noise, you know, because you saw them at the radio shanty once (you’d never dare to ask, you’re a kid but you’re not a fucking moron, your father would never let you spend money on something so frivolous). His hoodie is ripped at the sleeves and he’s picking at his food with a book in his hand. Troll Keroac. Interesting, you guess. You still aren’t very good at reading most of the old troll kingdom dialects, thought you’ve been working on it in your free time.

He doesn’t even look at you as you sit down, and you pull out your textbooks and notebook and don’t cry for how much more convenient it is to have them all right there. You’re glad it’s your right wrist in the brace, nondominant, don’t have to worry about getting lectured about how much more useful it is to be able to use both (why does it matter if you’re ambidextrous if you’ll never need a strife specibus in the first place?).

The hall around you has erupted into deafening whispers that you shut out with ease, just like home, just like David mumbling under his breath right behind you, but apparently it’s enough that he looks up, notices you sitting right across from him. You see his fingers curl out of the corner of your eye, and then his headphone cord shift as he pulls them off.

“Can I help you?”

You glance up to find him frowning at you, eyes narrowed and brows lowered.

“No?” You turn back to your homework. You’re kind of in the middle of something here. It’s not like you’re bugging him. You can’t control what the other kids are doing, who fuckin’ cares, anyway.

“I didn’t say you could sit with me,” he says. There is nothing kind about his voice, a defensive edge that curls around his accent, turns his tone nasty.

“I didn’t ask,” you reply. It’s the kind of thing you’d get a beatdown for, mouthing off like that. But he’s not your guardian and you sincerely doubt he’d really have the balls to start shit with a twelve year old in the middle of a cafeteria with at least three other adults present. Just seems kind of dumb, in your opinion.

He doesn’t stop glaring, eyes burning through your skull. You feel the bugs crawling across your skin, feel the anxiety curl in your gut until your teeth begin to grind together, so you sigh, roll your eyes, and look up at him. “Look,” you start, and you’re polite enough to keep your voice low, even, “there’s nowhere else to sit, and no one likes me any more than they’re afraid of you or whatever. I’m not bothering you, I’m not even fuckin’ lookin’ at you, so can I please just do my homework? I’ll leave after I’m done.”

His eyebrows go up, and you notice his eyes have a peculiar tint that makes them look red when the light hits. Huh. Cool. Strider David doesn’t say anything else for a minute after that, so you irresponsibly assume that’s the end of the conversation, drop your eyes and get back to work.

“How’d you hurt your wrist, jackin’ off?”

You don’t have friends. There’s a reason for that. Several, probably. “Yeah,” you drawl, finishing up an equation, “on top of your fuckin' mother.”

There are a few gasps and more murmuring and you start to get sick of it, the staring, the hissing whispers. You don’t like being part of a spectacle, and if he’s going to kick your shit in, you kind of wish he’d just get it over with already.

Instead, surprising you and everyone else, the side of his mouth quirks up into a smile, something like a dimple tugging at the right side of his mouth. “Dirtdick, right?”

You could correct him. You could tell him it’s a family name, that it meant something to someone far back enough in your line you don’t actually know the origin, that it’s the name given to people in a church your family no longer follows. You could play it off, say _“I know right, isn’t it terrible?”_

But you don’t.

“It’s just Dirk,” you say, just a bit curt, flick your eyes to challenge him.

“Okay, Dick,” he says, and now he’s definitely smiling, and people are definitely staring. “You can call me Dave.”

People don’t talk shit about you, you find out, because they have nothing to say. A couple think you’re a clumsy moron, that you’re here because of a mishap or because you’re actually older than you look and you’re lying. When Dave tells you this, you shrug because quite frankly, you don’t actually care. You’re surprised they’d bother at all.

People do, however, have plenty to say about David Strider. Very little of it is true.

He was a rich kid whose parents died, he’s the one who killed them to get the inheritance, he’s actually from New York and fakes the accent, his parents abandoned him and he pretends to have money. People say he’s a demon, people say he’s been kicked out of other schools. They think he’s a freak, or an idiot, or a genius. It’s odd, you admit, to hear so many things about a person who doesn’t seem to talk to anyone.

“It’s not all lies, I guess,” he tells you, always with that half-smile, like it’s funny that people hate him. You don’t know. Maybe it is.

He hasn’t complained about your sitting at his table for the past week or so, and it’s gotten to the point where he’ll actually grab your tray for you so you can haul your bag with less trouble. You don’t say thank you, but he never asks you to.

You’re not even really sure how it came up, in the first place. Curiosity on your part, maybe (you’ll recognize this flaw in your personality later, learn to correct it early on in life), an interest in the first person you’ve bothered to speak to in a month.

“My dad was an investment banker,” he laughs, shoving food in his face and chewing with his mouth open. He doesn’t really know what that means. His mother was the third daughter heiress to some energy company that dated back to the kingdom days, and that he has no claim to. They died in a car crash when he was ten. He doesn’t really remember either of them that well, but the way his face tenses up a little, fingers twitching, you feel like it might be a lie.

He did live in New York, for a time, and he tells you this with a shrug when you bring up the rumor. After his parents died, with his aunt and cousins. Upstate, real fancy place, dead center of the old Dersetown.

“Why’d you leave?” you ask, though you think it’s pretty fucking rude, since you just met and you don’t even know where he lives now. But he offered the information freely, so you figure he’s not sensitive enough about it for it to matter. New York sounds a helluva lot better than Texas, Odessa in particular.

Dave shrugs. “Uncle was a drunk, ‘n kind of an ass. He only knocked me a few times but he didn’t like me around much, big ol’ mouth and a bad attitude. S’not a huge deal. When they came back to check on me and asked if I wanted to stay or not, I told them I’d take fuckin’ foster care.” He tears off a piece of his pizza crust and munches on it thoughtfully. “Ain’t much of a place for a boy from Texas there, anyway. Snobby fucks.”

You don’t know what to say to that. You’re aware now that people think you’re clumsy, that you’re small enough to have a bully or two, and you’re not close enough for you to tell him about your parents. “That’s fucked up,” is what you settle on.

“It really is,” he sighs, and then he hands you his bottle of orange soda with the cap half-unscrewed.

Dave becomes your only friend after that, and the only one you really need. You don’t expect it, really, with him at two years older than you, a sophomore who skipped a grade (he doesn’t think it’s impressive, considering the birthday cutoff is what fucked him over, but you still think it’s pretty cool), and he spends more time in detention, you note, than he does in class. He’d been through four homes before he got to Odessa, and since he’s been transferred to private school, he’s been less of a hazard.

He covers you with his bubble like an opaque shroud, a layer of peace between you and the rest of your classmates. He still mumbles under his breath throughout all of first period, even when he’s sending you notes, and he lets you sit with him every day, chatters his way through whatever book he’s reading to the point where you wonder how he can possibly pay attention to both.

You’re nervous, the first time he invites you over, because you have to call your mother while she’s at work using the school phone, get permission to be picked up by somebody else.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she sighs. You can hear the creak of her chair, the tap of her fingers on the keyboard. She never has time for you, you think bitterly, but you will not beg, not today. “Did you ask your father?”

“He was unavailable at the time,” you say, perfect monotone, keep your face smooth and calm. Dave is looking at you from across the office, eyebrows bunched and mouth in a thin line. You wonder what he thinks of you. Are afraid, perhaps for the first time, what it must be.

“Dietrich,” she begins, but you interrupt.

“Please.” And it sounds desperate, pathetic, like you’re a scared little kid again. As if you’ve ever been anything else. “He’s my friend.”

You don’t actually know if that’s true. You’re not entirely sure what qualifies someone as a friend or not. You hope, perhaps equally pathetic, equally desperate, that it’s true.

She clicks her tongue, sighs again, but concedes. “You will need to explain where you’ve been when you get home,” is all she says before hanging up.

You don’t thank her.

There’s really no point in it.

“What the fuck was that?” Dave asks as he follows you back out towards the front of the school to wait for his foster mom.

You just shrug. “They’re busy a lot. S’kinda hard to get ahold of them at work. Sorry,” you add, when you realize how shitty that sounds. “It’s okay. I just have to be home for dinner or whatever. Normal kid stuff.”

He stares, then snorts, shoves you hard in the shoulder. “A’ight, fine, I’ll fuckin’ allow it, but you’re missin’ out. My dad makes a mean goddamn grubloaf.”

“That sounds disgusting,” you say, fighting a smile. “But I’ll try to appear more culturally sensitive, for your sake.”

“Dude, you don’t actually make it with grubs,” Dave huffs, frowning. “My dad’d never eat that, strictly human food in this house, that’s just what it’s _called_. Mom just can’t fuckin’ cook, she’s an embarrassment to trollkind everywhere.”

Dave’s foster dad is a human man with salt and pepper hair and warm brown eyes, and his foster mom is a retired jadeblood who stands a half foot taller than him. They look at Dave the way you wish your parents would look at you, fond disapproval. An older couple’s probably good for him, you think as he leads you down to his basement bedroom. He’s kind of a fuckstick, and you’d pity anyone else.

“They’re good people,” he tells you, pausing at the door to his room. He drums his fingers on the handle self-consciously. “You cannot rib on me, okay, I’ll die if I get made fun of by a middle schooler.”

“I’m a freshman,” you scoff, and then you shove past him, elbow him in the gut as you go, and swing the door open.

It’s.

Well.

It’s pretty cool. He hovers uselessly behind you as you poke at his fossils, his ancient SBaHJ merch. You’d forgotten the series even existed.

You smooth your hand over an old poster, lousy with particle effects, and hide a smile. “This shit is like two hundred years old.”

“I have dreams about them,” he admits, goes to sit on his bed, flopping back. “Weirdest damn thing, my parents didn’t even know what I was fuckin’ talking about, I had to go to a historian society to prove I wasn’t insane.”

“There’s not much left about them,” you say, don’t tell him that you do sometimes, too. It’s not important, and you always assume you must’ve seen something on TV once as a kid. “The dude who directed them all but disappeared ‘round the same time, s’not like a lotta people know about it.”

He sits up on his elbows and you notice again how red his eyes are, even in artificial light. “But you do,” he says.

“But I do,” you agree.

He smiles, a flash or white teeth, crooked grin. “Wanna play _Grand Snacks Fuckyeah_?”

You tip your head, bite the inside of your cheek. “We’re supposed to work on our homework.”

“Fuck you, we’ll do it later.”

“I have to be home for dinner,” you say.

“But you don’t have to be,” he says, and you notice again the way he tips his eyebrows up, something like a pout. This is. Improbable. Ridiculous.

“Fine,” you say, drop your backpack by the door. “But I call player one.”

“As the fuck if,” he snorts, and then he rolls off the side of the bed instead of standing up, and wriggles under his bed to fetch his extra controller.

You spend almost every day after school at his house, and you’re well into Holy Week by the time he asks if you want to go trick-or-treating together.

“Why the fuck would I want to do something inane like that,” you ask in a hollow voice, halfway through your worksheet.

“Because free candy is the shit,” he snorts. He’s copying your homework, even though you know he can do it on his own. You let him. “You’ve never gone?”

You have to pause and think about it. You’re sure you must have, but not in a couple years. The last time you must’ve been nine, at most. “Of course I have,” you say simply, don’t look him in the eye. “Don’t be stupid.”

He is quiet for a moment after that. You hate it, how he always stares at you. It’s not like the others, not like your father, but you feel like he sees something there, deep inside you, and you hate it. “We’re going,” he decides, snatching your paper and flipping it around. He starts filling in your answers for you in his chicken scratch, bats away your hands when you try to grab it back. “Mom’ll drive us. It’ll be fun.” He looks up at you between his bangs, eyebrows up, dark, expectant, and you bite the inside of your lip hard enough you almost draw blood. “Okay?”

“Okay,” you concede, if only to make him stop looking at you like that. “Give me back my fucking homework.”

“Fuck you, no kid likes doing homework.”

“I do,” you snap, and you flick him between the eyes, wrestle the paper back when he yelps in surprise and lets go.

All of his answers are right, you note, with something like misplaced pride, but his numbers look horrible, so you erase it anyway.

You stand in the doorway to his house with your backpack slung over your shoulder in full costume and he looks at you like you’re insane.

“What the fuck is that supposed to be?” he asks in a strangled voice.

“A puppet,” you say, nudging past him. You’ve very quickly gotten used to letting yourself in as if you live there. His parents like you more, he teases. You don’t agree, because quite honestly you’d prefer being ignored. “It’s Holloween, dude, I ain’t just gonna walk around like a candycorn princess." He keeps staring so you sigh, drop your shoulders and roll your eyes. "I see it in my dreams sometimes. It’s not that big of a deal.” You don’t think you’re that weird, anyway, adjust your backward hat for the fifteenth time. Hats never really fit you properly, always one step removed from comfortable.

“You look kinda like the cherub legend,” he says, poking you in the bright red cheek. You swat and his hand and he laughs. “C’mon, I’ll grab my pillow cases ‘n we can head out.”

“What are you even supposed to be,” you scoff, look at his bright red jumpsuit and scribbled on beard.

He gives you a shit-eating grin and you know before he says it, you do, but there’s a reason you asked, and the absurd shape he makes with his mouth as he pretends to fall down the stairs makes you smile.

You find out you have the same birthday the day of his fifteenth, and he stares at you with wide open eyes, mouth agape, and says, “What the fuck.”

You grimace, shrug. “It’s not a big deal,” you tell him. It’s never been a big deal. It doesn’t matter. Who cares.

“The fuck it is,” he says, dragging you outside. “C’mon, we're getting a cake before I shit my fucking pants in rage.”

“Gross,” you monotone, reluctant as he pulls you towards the car.

He got his license early, and he’s not necessarily supposed to be driving with other people in the car, but his aunt got it for him, “Because a growing boy needs a way to get around,” and it’s not as though his fosters could do much to stop him - Dave is kind of a force of nature, when he gets going.

Still, his dad doesn’t like it, and his mother worries more that it’ll be unsafe than anything.

“I didn’t earn it,” Dave explains, rolling his eyes as he yanks the door open. “It’s not even new.”

It looks plenty fuckin’ new to you, but you don’t know much about cars to start, so you can’t really talk.

“I don’t want a cake,” you try, when you’re already on the way, tugging nervously at the seat belt. You wonder how he can drive with such ease, after his parents died.

That’s probably a fucked up thing to say, so you don’t.

“Shut up,” Dave says, so you do, and he buys you an ice cream with bright orange frosting that almost makes you sick with its sweetness.

It kind of fucks you up that anyone could have that much money, to give him a lightly used car, so shiny and clean, but he starts driving you to school in the morning and takes you home in the afternoon, and picks you up on the weekends to hang out at the park near your house and watch the kids play baseball.

He never asks if you want to play, which is fine, because you don’t, and when it rains you hunker down in the coffee shop downtown and spill your drinks all over your homework while you argue about who’s doing the sheet this week.

You make it through Candlenights with less bruises (Dave invites you back to New York with him, but you can’t stand it, can’t stand the idea of coming home after that, and you say no, despite the way his eyes tighten at the corners, that you can read anxiety in the lines across his face), and you make it back from New Year with a fresh face and too much optimism.

You are thirteen with a blood-clogged nose and a broken thumb as your mother and father drop you off for school. You could have taken the bus, you told them you would take the bus, but you didn’t ask permission to get a ride from _“that stuck up little brat”_ and you already took a hard one for trying to protest. You watch it drip onto your shirt and don’t panic, don’t move until you get out of the car, and ignore the first bell as you make a beeline down the hall.

It’s halfway through first period when Dave finds you in the bathroom, trying to dab dried blood out of your sleeves. It got on your shirt, how could you let it get on your shirt, you know better, you _know_ better.

“Dude what the fuck?” he hisses, yanking on your arm to wheel you around. “I waited for you for like twenty fuckin’ minutes, you shoulda texted me or somethin’, I was late again cuz of you and I -” But then he sees your face, and his own softens with pity that makes you sick to your stomach. “Christ, Dirk.”

You don’t ask what he means, and he doesn’t ask who did it, just takes you by the wrist despite your protests, careful as he can, and shoves it under the sink tap.

“I’m fine,” you try, jerk back in inches. “It’s not a big deal, I’m okay.”

“Dirk,” he says again, low and sad. His eyebrows are low, his eyes so, so bright red. He presses his lips together and you feel, for the first time, some measure of shame in the way you’ve been treated.

“I can do it myself,” you say, tug harder.

He lets go, but only so he can reach out, quick as lightning, and wrestle your shirt off and over your head before you can stop, though you yelp, smack at him to get free. “Calm down, idiot,” he hisses, and you only stop when he rips off his own shirt and throws it at your face. “What are you, like a girl’s extra small?”

“Medium, now,” you mumble, pulling his shirt over your head without undoing most of the buttons. It only hangs off you a little, but your own shirt has always been a bit too short.

Dave pulls your shirt on over his tank, rolling up the sleeves and tugging at it to button across his chest. Other than hugging a little too tight across the ribs, it’s not that bad - he’s skinny like you are, square in the shoulders but trim at the waist. He sighs, smooths his hair into place in the mirror, tugs at the collar. “Could be worse, I guess.”

You don’t make a habit of crying in front of other people, or really crying at all. Life hasn’t been easy on you and you’re no stranger to harsh words and harsher fists. Fine, easy. Baby stuff, really.

But standing in the boys’ bathroom of Fancy McFuckpants Academy in a shirt two sizes too big for you, staring at your only friend in the whole world, wearing a shirt with your blood staining the sleeves, the collar, being completely casual about it, like it’s the simplest thing in the world, you stop short of outright bawling.

He doesn’t make you go to first period, and it’s well into third before he pulls you up by the wrist of your good hand, leads you out towards the parking lot. You put up a fight, of course you do, but he doesn’t relent, just drags you to his car and manhandles you into the front seat.

You’ll get in trouble, you know, later, when they find out, and maybe they’ll tell your parents, or maybe you’ll intercept in time, but for now you sit in the front seat of your best friend’s car and pull your knees up to your chest, and you shake and cry and feel small.

Dave is careful with you after that, at least for as long as it takes to drive you home, to introduce himself properly to your mother while your father sits stone-faced and cold, and he tells them (tells them, like he even has the right) that he’ll be driving you to school, that’s it’s on the way, it’s efficient, means you both have more time to study, and he shows them his ID, his license, tells them he got it from his aunt, with his hands shoved in his pockets, the most casual thing in the world, like you’re not hiding right behind him, like your hands aren’t curled into fists, shaking, always shaking.

“Strider,” your father says, tilts his head in the peculiar way he has, eyes focused and sharp, violently purple.

“Yessir,” Dave says, and he’s so completely straight, so still that you almost cannot believe he’s the same person. He doesn’t bring up what happened at school, he doesn’t acknowledge what they did. He just stares straight ahead with that frigid smile and rigid spine.

“Alright,” your father says, and then he’s got his book open and up to cover his face again, as though neither of you are there at all.

It’s the first time Dave’s been over to your house and you feel self-conscious as you lead him upstairs to your room, feel awkward about your heavy orange curtains and the scuff marks on the hardwood floor.

“You didn’t have to do that,” you say when the door is closed behind you,

Dave wanders straight to the window, feels the curtains between his fingers like they’re a thing of interest. He pauses when you speak, frowns as he turns a half inch to look back at you. “Yes I did,” he says seriously, “but it’s fine that you don’t think so.” He flaps the material weakly. “What the fuck is up with these things? I’ve never seen you wear orange a day in your life.”

You shrug, try not to feel defensive, try not to explode because you still can’t believe he talked to your parents like that, that he talked to them at all, that you’re still standing here, that you haven’t sunk through the floor or just. Died, right on the spot. “I dream about it, sometimes, I guess. I don’t really have a favorite color.”

Or you might, now, you think, watching the smile crack across Dave’s face, watching him consider you for a beat. “The light bother your eyes?” he asks, and you blink, squint. It’s not that you’re surprised, cuz why would you be? No shit, is the right answer, though not a polite one. Guess you don’t really have time to think about it, since sunglasses are strictly prohibited on campus, and Dave’s eyes have always been worse than yours.

“We live in Texas.”

“Duh, I know that,” he scoffs, and he drops it, strides across the room and starts plucking shit off your bookshelf. “Christ, dude, do you have _any_ hobbies?”

You’ve lived here all your life, and you’ve never felt much of anyway about your room, tidy and neat, a faded Pony Pals poster rolled up behind your desk, shoes tucked under your bed. “I don’t know,” you mumble, and rub at your arm, flex your fingers as they start to feel cold. You should have worn your sweater. If you’d just worn your sweater none of this would have happened at all.

He looks up from one of your old books on horses and frowns, squints like he’s trying to see something, either sizing you up or, or you don’t know. You’ve never felt like David was judging you, never worried he might mock you. It’s just not really in his nature, you think, to be cruel for no reason. “But you like math, right?”

“Yes,” you say, cautious, rocking back on your feet. You fold your arms across your chest, try not to feel half as defensive. “So what?”

“So that’s something,” he says, snaps the book shut and puts it back carefully. “Learning shit, knowing things. That’s something. Plus,” he says, and there’s that shitty grin again, “I can see your fucking pony posters.”

“It’s _one_ ,” you huff, and then you throw your pillow at his head.

It’s almost The Grand Anniversary and you’re still thirteen, sitting on the side of the road in the middle of the Western Barkbeast Desert with your elbows on your knees, sweat sticking your shirt to your back, hair wilted and pasted to your forehead. There’s nothing for miles and miles and miles, and you think _“Oh gods, I’m going to die out here.”_

You’d wait in the car if it weren’t dead and probably more of a death sentence than anything, and you watch the arc of Dave’s back where he’s bent under the hood, cursing and muttering to himself, just low enough that you can’t quite hear it. You haven’t figured out why he does that, like he’s worried someone will hear, or is afraid to leave the silence be.

You’re opposites that way, you guess.

You wipe the manual across your forehead and squint down at the pages again. Sunglasses are a novel thing, really. Maybe you should invest in more pairs. Probably save you a couple headaches, and maybe a wrinkle or two, on top of it. Glance back at Dave, in nothing but a tanktop with his shirt tied around his waist, cussing louder now, wiping his face fruitlessly on his arm.

“Do you have any clue what you’re doing?” you call, tucking the manual under your arm and launching yourself upright.

He laughs, and you think there is something to him that is almost inscrutable, shades over his eyes, grin crooked and white. “No fuckin’ clue, dude,” he says. “Gonna be real I’m pretty much just smackin’ shit around in here and hoping it runs. What the fuck kind of dick gives someone a car that hasn’t had its battery checked?”

“Normal people get their battery checked on their own,” you say, frown. His arms are lobster red and you wince in sympathy. You told him to put on sunscreen, bro, you warned him, dawg.

He didn’t listen.

Dave never really listens to anybody. You don’t usually mind, because he does listen to you, when it matters. You’ve always found it a bit strange, but it is at the bottom of a long list of real shit that actually bothers you.

“Lemme see,” you tell him, and he moves aside, doesn’t curve away as you lean in beside him, take a look.

You don’t really know anything about cars, but you’ve been reading the manual for a good half hour, and you have an idea.

You won’t think about it til later, when you get back home and start poking around Dave’s car on the regular, whenever you or he have time, that it might be the first time in a very, very long time that you’ve ever truly taken an interest in anything.

You make it to El Paso in one piece and flop onto the hotel bed, burnt to a crisp and tired beyond measure.

“Dude, you’re getting the bed all gross,” Dave gripes, tossing the keys on the side table.

“Fuck you, I fixed your car, I get to be as gross as I want,” you scoff, wriggle your smudged-up arms across the comforter to prove a point.

“Gods, take a fuckin’ shower, dude,” he says, but then he rolls right on top of you and you yelp when one of his hand lands smack on your bright red shoulder.

“You’re a fucking _dick_ ,” you groan, shove at him.

He pushes back, and you’re so startled when you manage to wrestle him off the bed that you can’t the laugh that startles its way out of you.

“You’re a cruel man, Dietrich Strider,” he sighs from the floor.

You fold your hands under your chin, regard him as he lays splayed across the carpet. “I think I already knew that.”

Dave pauses at that, furrows his brow. “You know,” he starts, and then he doesn’t say anything at all.

It’s late-July before you get to see Dave again, after his family gets back from vacation, and even then it’s only for a week. You eat ice cream and sit in his basement and play video games. He reads, you draw, and your joints don’t ache, just for once.

Your family never goes anywhere til August, usually, and you never look forward to the trips further south, to the uncomfortably crisp clothes and tight expressions everyone makes in photographs.

You have never really liked the ocean, you think, might never, you think, in a way that makes you sad.

You are thirteen and a half and stand on a beach in Corpus Christi and you are cold. You’ve been having nightmares since the week after The Grand Anniversary, when you got home to Odessa and woke up on the floor the next morning, gasping for breath and drenched in sweat.

You’re not supposed to go out alone, your mother doesn’t like it, neither of them like not knowing where you are, but you don’t care, because you can’t sleep, and that fear paralyzes you, you can’t sleep, you can’t, you cannot go to sleep, you cannot go to that place.

You take a step into the water, then another. The sand finds its way between your toes and your ankles shake to stand still.

You are not afraid.

You will not be afraid.

Your hands curl into fists and you think about your back hitting hard-packed dirt, the rocks digging into your shoulders, the sting of cold metal against your throat.

It’s just a dream.

It’s just a dream.

You take more classes together, in your sophomore year, in his junior year, heads bent together as your fight over the schedule. You want to take math first period. He thinks math before lunch is a cardinal sin. He wants to take art, you think it’s a waste of time.

“Fuck you, I take art every year,” he snaps, adding it to your electives.

“And I’m sure your teacher’s fuckin’ sick of you,” you grunt, reaching across him to grab the mouse. You grew over the summer again, and you’re catching up to him, though you’re sure you’re going to lose this race. He’s older than you, faster than you, and you think it’s unfair when he bats you away, gets his other arm up under yours and shoulders you away, smashes your face into his hair.

“Suck a dick, dude, you’re taking art. You need to have fun.”

“I have fun,” you say reluctantly.

He laughs, but it’s mean, a little rude. “Dirk, I’ve never met a less fun person in my entire life.”

“Fuck you,” you spit, and then you bite his shoulder.

“You little _shit_ ,” he screeches, and then he’s got his arm hooked around your neck and you smack at him while he smashes his hand into your perfect hair.

Dave joins the fencing team and after gentle cajoling, you reluctantly join him. It isn’t that you are not interested, because you are, you like the physicality and the thought process behind it, you just,

You just keep having these dreams.

It doesn’t matter. You’re trying not to let them bother you.

You study together during lunch, and when it’s annoying to reach across the table at every turn, Dave starts sitting next to you. It’s not much of a problem, really; you’re both left-handed and you don’t bump arms when you eat, but he keeps stealing your pencil mid-stroke, almost brains you with his elbow a couple of times before you get the hang of it.

The following Saturday his foster mom asks if you two are pale in a serious, bordering on concerned tone, and Dave stands so abruptly he spills coke all over your homework, slams the door in her face.

He doesn’t talk to you for a week after that.

You know what it means, to be pale, and you know she didn’t mean anything by it, you know the culture is different, that it would have been fine, you think, if you were, but it still eats at you, sitting alone in your room when you don’t sleep, when you can’t sleep, circles around and around, _“What did I do wrong?”_

Your dreams get bad, for a bit there, and you spend your nights creeping through the house like a ghost so you don't have to sleep, so you can avoid the oppressive darkness, the sensation of drowning, the horrible laughter, the air that leaves your lungs if you don't let go fast enough.

You bite your tongue so hard you cough blood on the floor, and you wash it away with hand soap from the bathroom so your parents don't know.

You spend the days following hiding in the library after school, studying alone, and you go back to eating behind the portables, balance your tray on one knee and your notebook on the other.

Dave finds you there, on the fifth day, and you see him out of the corner of your eye, standing just out of reach, watching you.

You ignore him, and eventually he comes to sit beside you.

“Is this what you did? Before?”

“Yeah,” you say softly, don’t stop your work. You’re trying not to bite the inside of your cheek.

“It’s nice,” he says.

“No it’s not,” you say.

“Yeah,” he sighs, and then he reaches across you and picks up your tray. “C’mon.”

You follow him back to the cafeteria, and you eat together, and the next day, he picks you up and it’s like nothing ever changed.

Dave’s sixteenth birthday is busier than you’ve ever seen his house, and you flounder in the sea of people, duck under the arm of his mom and just miss his grouchy uncle by a hair.

It’s tradition to celebrate the sixteenth as a coming of age, and you haven’t even considered doing anything for you own, don’t really care to. You plan on leaving home and never fucking looking back.

Beyond that, who gives a shit?

You find Dave in the backyard, standing next to a girl that’s barely three inches shorter than him, hair golden blonde, black lipstick and a smile that makes you uneasy before you even meet her.

“Hey, dude, c’mere,” Dave says, and you only acquiesce when you see the relief on his face upon seeing yours, struggle not to smile. “This is my cousin, Rose. She sucks, you’ll love her.”

“Wow, what an introduction,” his cousin drawls, and then she turns her eyes on you, brilliant violet, and you stutter to a stop, suck in air before you remember yourself, shake it off.

You cannot do this in front of Dave’s relatives.

“You must be the Dietrich I’ve heard so much about,” Rose says, and her voice is gentle, borders on amused.

“It’s just Dirk,” you say cautiously, edge around the other side of Dave. You aren’t hiding. New people just. Make you nervous.

There is something so startlingly familiar about the way she tips her head, how her face softens, cheeks dimpling from right to left. “Yes, of course. My mistake. My name is Rosalind. You may, of course, call me Rose. It’s only fair, I think.”

“Dunno about that,” you murmur, but you do take her hand when she offers it, allow her a sturdy shake.

You are nothing if not a gentleman, but her hands are cold, just like Dave's, and you let your hand slide away, clutch your orange coke and hide behind Dave for the rest of the day.

“What are you gonna do?” you ask him later, when everyone’s and it’s just the two of you alone on his floor, staring at the ceiling. Dave’s parents had a kid before him, and there are plastic stars still stuck up, lit up in constellation patterns that feel unfamiliar, despite the fact that you’ve known them all your life.

You have moments like that, sometimes, where things feel unnatural, feel just off enough that you can’t put your finger on it.

It bothered you more as a kid, but now you dream and you keep your head down and you don’t worry about it because it doesn’t matter.

“I don’t know,” he says, so soft it’s almost a sigh. “I’m not gonna leave school early, y’know? I got plans and shit but like. I dunno. I guess I could live by myself now, if I wanted to. But I kind of don’t want to?” He looks at you. In the dark his eyes are colorless, could be grey, if you squinted. “Is that messed up? That I’d rather just stay here?”

“No,” you say, too quickly, and it’s selfish, you know, but he’s your only friend, and you’re barely fourteen now, still two years left to march towards your freedom. You don’t want to lose him now. Couldn’t stand it. “No, I think that it’s okay, to be happy.”

He hums, opens his mouth like he wants to say something else.

Then he doesn’t, and neither do you.

You take small engines in your second semester and no one comments when you wear your winter sweater with your spring uniform. You come home smeared with grease and Dave starts keeping a towel in his car, even if he never actually complains about the mess you may or not be making. It makes you happy, tearing shit apart, ducking your head down and spending the time to put it back together. It’s neat, it fascinates you. You try to explain it to Dave, and he laughs, but he lets you have his fun, and you don’t make fun of him when he buys a camera with his allowance that April.

Dave is your only friend in the entire world and you spend all of the summer before your junior year in the basement of his house, helping him draft and send scholarship letters.

“This is ridiculous,” you sigh after the fourteenth letter. Your hand is starting to cramp and you’re hungry. “Dave, you’re too smart for half these places.”

“No, _you're_ too smart for _all_ these places,” he says, jabbing you in the head with his pen. “This rest of us are just trying to live out here, feeding on the scraps smartass chumps like you leave behind.”

You swat at him, but he just laughs at you, and you fix his sentence structure, clip his run-ons so the professors at Prospit Central will think he’s a fucking genius, which you kinda think he already is, in his own way. He works hard, he gets good marks, and since you became friends, his trips to detention have halved.

You still have to wait for him some days, though. It’s kind of a pain, considering he’s your ride, but it’s better than waiting for the bus, and he gives you his keys so you can sit in the car, if you really want to.

He gives pause at the next application, and you see his fingers crinkle the corner nervously.

You try to peer over his hand, but he blocks you with his arm. “What?”

He doesn’t answer.

“Dude, what is it?”

“Nothing,” he says finally, moving to drop it off the counter.

He’s usually faster than you, but not today, and you snatch it from him before he can smack you away.

Your eyebrows go up. “Film school.” Interesting choice. Not one you were expecting.

“Fuck you,” he snarls, hand twitching to take it back.

“I didn’t know you were seriously interested in that kinda shit,” you say, try not to sound hurt. He would have told you, you think, or thought. He should have.

You’re being irrational.

“Yeah, cuz it’s for people who don’t have any real fuckin’ talent. Give it back.” He makes another swipe for it.

“It isn’t,” you scold, smoothing it out on the table. “And you shouldn’t talk like that. You’re smart, Dave.”

“Not anywhere as smart as you,” he says bitterly, but you give him a look, and he scowls at you, fingers flexing, inching towards the paper in millimeters. He shifts uncomfortably when you don’t concede, clears his throat. “Listen, I’m not gonna get into a yuppy ass Canadian school, so can we drop it?”

You regard him curiously. You’ve never seen Dave look embarrassed about his interests, not since the first time you saw his room. You remember the bookcases of fossils, the faded merch of a legendary series no one remembers. “No,” you decide, clicking your pen and beginning to fill out his name and personal info, “we cannot.”

Dave’s eyes get bad the month before school starts, or maybe they’ve always been bad, maybe you never noticed how he winced in the light, how dark his room was, how he hid in your room when he could, after school, mumbled about headaches, how he slept through most of the day on the weekends, how he was up all night.

You sit with his mother in the optometrist’s office and she pats you on the arm, sudden enough that you flinch without thinking.

“Sorry,” you say, ashamed, guilty, but the look she gives you is all pity.

You can’t stand it, hate that people look at you like this, but there isn’t anything you could do to change it.

“He’ll be alright, dear,” she says instead, offers a smile. “It’s okay to be worried.”

“I ain’t,” you lie, though it’s obvious you’re lying, and you can’t quite manage a smile when Dave wanders out of the back room, wearing tinted shades, black as night, and giving you a thumbs up.

Dave breaks a kid’s nose at the end of September, and gets suspended for three days. It’s not his fault, you think, as you watch him pace his room like a tiger caged, as he bites at his nails and mutters to himself.

His dad grounded him, and you’re pretty sure the only reason they let you in is because you were sporting a bruised jaw and holding his shades, which had been knocked from his face just seconds before the fight broke out.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” he says.

“I know,” you say gently.

“I fucking - fuck. Fuck fuck _fuck_.” He loops around his room and comes back, stops in front of you. “I shouldn’t have done that,” he says again.

“It’s okay,” you say, and you grab his hand, tug him until he sits on the bed next to you. “You didn’t have to, I don’t care what people say about me.” You hand him his shades.

He stares at you, eyebrows furrowed, and you wonder if he thinks you’re an idiot. You don’t know. Maybe you are. “Yes I did,” he murmurs, and he takes them from you, slow, delicate, like he’s afraid to hurt you. “I shouldn’t have, but I don’t regret it.”

“Oh,” you say.

“Yeah,” he says, and then he sighs, drops back, and puts his hands over his eyes.

You lie next to him and think that you’ve never had anyone stand up for you, before Dave, and you don’t fuckin’ know what you’ll do, when he graduates.

You sit in Dave’s bathroom the night of Holloween, and think, somewhat hysterically, yet calmer than you’ve ever been, _“Wow, he actually broke it this time.”_

“Why do you do that?” he murmurs, on his knees before you with a wet wash cloth in hand, pressed to your face. His eyebrows tip together in the middle, and you look at his bitten lips, how he’s got his new glasses shoved up into his untidy white hair, try not to think about the way you want to fix it. Anything to avoid the concern in his cherry red eyes, the way his nose is so long and straight, so unlike your own, now, fuck. Fuck.

You shrug. It wasn’t like this, before Dave. You never did anything, before Dave. “Just got tired of it, I guess.”

He clucks his tongue, but doesn’t speak, and you don’t flinch when he touches his hand against your face, runs his thumb under your eye. “It’s gonna be pretty bad.”

“I’ve had worse,” you say, turn your head and spit red in the trash can.

Dave takes you to for your driving exam on your fifteenth birthday and you spent half the time cursing so much the instructor, an already frazzled carapacian, looks something bordering on frantic by the time you parallel park.

“I swear I’m not usually like this,” you say, face pressed against the steering wheel.

“You’re doing just fine, Mr. Strider,” she says meekly, and despite all the ways you feel you failed, you pass with a perfect score.

Dave takes you out for ice cream after and you give him an unimpressed look when he climbs into the passenger seat, standing on the sidewalk with your arms crossed.

“No,” you say.

“Come on,” he says. “I’ve been driving your sorry ass around for like, two years.”

“If you didn’t like it you shoulda said,” you say snidely. “The fuck you think I am, I ain’t got insurance, Dave.”

“I do,” he groans, knocks his head back against the seat. “Dude, come the fuck on. I ain’t got all day.”

“Yes you do,” you sniff, but you concede, go around the opposite side. “But I just want you to know, you’re being kind of a bitch about this.”

“Fuck you,” he says.

“Fuck yourself,” you scoff, and you put the car in drive.

You spend Candlenights in Dave’s living room that year, sitting on the floor with a blanket wrapped around you while you watch shitty old movies and make jokes about the bad acting. Dave loves B movies, and you wonder how you never noticed before, the way he talks about this shit, how he moves his hands, how he smiles, how loose he gets, gesticulating and ranting.

You like it, you like seeing it on him, this ease, and you wish, miserably, that you could keep him here.

But you can’t.

Gods below, you couldn’t keep him from the world.

You head back to El Paso the week before The Grand Anniversary, early April, and the sun is blistering but you are capable with a car now, and you make it to your nowhere motel with no hiccups, just as sunburned and thirsty as fuck.

This time it’s you who flops on top of Dave, and you roll, you punch, you kick, until you both drop to the floor, you on top, and him kicking at you half-heartedly.

“Say uncle,” you monotone.

“Eat shit and die,” he says. “I’m gonna kick your ass if you rip my damn sunburn open.”

“As the fuck if,” you scoff, wiggle your arms until they’re tight around his stomach. “M’almost as tall as you now, and you’re a wimp. Give.”

“You’re fuckin’ heavy is what you are,” he huffs, but he doesn’t roll you off, and you pillow your cheek in the place between his shoulder blades.

“You smell like shit,” you tell him, and that gets a laugh. He bends a noodle arm back and makes an attempt to tickle your sides.

“Wonder whose fault that fuckin’ is. Get off, dude. I need a shower.”

And you could, you should, there’s nothing comfortable about lying on the floor of a grubby motel room with your skin stuck against his, but still, you hesitate.

“Fuck you, pay me,” you say instead.

Dave laughs, but he doesn’t move, and you fall asleep like that for almost an hour, until he finally rolls you off him, drags himself up to take a shower.

You lay on the floor and stare at the wall and think about the ways that you may have fucked everything up.

Dave graduates high honors in early June and you sit in the front row so he can see you from the stage. You know his family is somewhere in the audience, but they don’t matter as his eyes rake the crowd and he grins, outright grins, when he sees your face.

You vault your way over the edge of the bleachers and drop down onto the track. Faster that way, and who cares if people stares, who fucking cares, fucking hell, you are so, so proud of this one singular dude.

Dave finds you immediately, sweeps you up and spins you around like you weigh as much as a bag of goddamn grapes, laughing as you gasp and choke in surprise. You haven’t been small enough for this horseshit since you were thir-fucking-teen.

You push at his hands, mash at his face, but he just holds tighter.

“I did it!” he says, and he’s holding you still, looking up at you with wide sparkling eyes from over the edge of his shades.

“Yeah,” you murmur, touching his face, thumbing his smile, and you realize, for the first time, that you want to kiss him.

And you do, later that night in his foster parents’ basement, drunk off Lone Star and watching Starsky and Hutch.

You don’t plan to, really, just like you hadn’t planned on drinking (his dad said it was okay, that as long as you were home and didn’t do anything stupid and his mother didn’t know, it was fine).

“Thanks for comin’,” Dave says again. He said it to you the first time in the car on the way over. He hadn’t asked if you wanted to go home first (you hadn’t), and he’d still been grinning that stupid grin.

“You’re my only friend,” you tell him with a shrug, moving your beer as he flops down too close, leg pressed to yours. “Of course I did.”

“Fuck, don’t say that, it sounds pathetic when you say it like that,” he laughs, nudges his shoulder against yours.

You push him back, think about how stupid tall he’s getting, how you swear you’ll be taller than him one day, just watch.

He leans in close to you, eyes drooped and red and beautiful and you just -

“There’s something I need to tell you,” he blurts, face inches from yours. You can smell the beer and too old cologne from here.

“Okay,” you say, wrapping your fist in his shirt. “But tell me in a minute, there’s something I want to do first.”

“Oh, well -”

And you kiss him.

His lips are bitten, same as always, wet with beer and he inhales against you, chokes a little, but you pull away and think, “WOW, I want to do that again.”

“I’m going to the film school in Vancouver,” he says, and your chest seizes, throat closing up, panic, rage, hurt.

“Oh,” you say, and your fingers are shaking, curled into his collar. You don’t want to let go. Your eyes sting at the corners. “Can I kiss you again?”

Dave laughs. “Yeah,” he says, all shiny white teeth and rose pink cheeks. He cups his hand on your cheek and you stutter a breath. “Yeah, you can.”

So you do.


	2. balance staff

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I really cannot stress how many liberties I took out here.  
> Bro sabotages his own happiness, and a bunch of other stuff.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As Lorde would say, it's just melodrama. I apologize now for the lack of a happy ending. Warnings for underage drinking, some kissy stuff, implied sex, and an age difference in a relationship mentioned briefly.

“So I’ve been thinking,” Dave says, thoughtful, a little soft.

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” you say, because you’ve been trying not to, and because you know, deep down, where it will lead you both.

You’re lying on the floor of a motel room in El Paso, Texas, and it’s so hot that you barely let your fingers touch, spread across the cool linoleum of the kitchenette.

“Not about that,” Dave says, almost irritated. He doesn’t like the heat much, or at the very least is worse at handling it than you ever have been. “But like, why do we even celebrate the Grand Anniversary? It seems so fucking pointless.”

You do pause at that, mull it over in your head. It’s well past April now, and while it’s true you two usually reserve El Paso for the Grand Anniversary weekend, Dave’s graduation was cause for an extended celebration. “Birth of the universe, I guess. S’posed to be the day the creators came back or some shit, isn’t it?” You never paid much attention, never cared to. Faith has always seemed a little useless to you.

“But did they really?” Dave asks, definitely frustrated now. “All that garbage is like, well over four hundred years old now. The kingdoms have been demolished, the newspaper clippings easily coulda been doctored, and it ain’t like there’s surviving video evidence showing more’n some grainy pictures of weird-dressed kids. It just feels. Weird.”

You roll over onto your stomach to regard him, and Dave’s eyes meet yours briefly before wandering back up to the ceiling. There’s a bunch in his brow and without thinking, you reach out to smooth it flat.

When he doesn’t stop you, it sends a little thrill down your spine.

“Why do you care so much?” you mumble, shoving his bangs carefully out of his eyes.

“I don’t,” he sighs, but it’s hesitant, uncertain. “I just think the whole thing feels… Sometimes I have weird dreams, I dunno. I sound like a conspiracy nut, huh?”

“Kinda.” You shrug, tap his face with the back of your knuckles. “But I also think it’s pretty on brand for you.”

“Ugh, shut up.” He shoves you lightly and laughs when you rock back into his space. “Did you remember to pack the Gamestation?”

“Duh,” you scoff, rolling yourself up to your feet. “If you wanted to get trounced so badly, all you need do is ask, David.”

“Oh yeah?” he drawls. “You think?” If you were paying more attention, you might have noticed the wild grin curling its way onto his face.

He’s got a hand around your ankle and has dropped you to the carpet before you can even think to shout the word “FUCK.”

  
“Do you think they’re dead?” you ask later, when you’ve finally fixed the air conditioning unit, showered, and crawled into the bed.

Dave yawns wide enough that you see he’s got a molar missing on the top left side. You never noticed that before. “I ‘unno,” he shrugs, reaching back and turning off the light. “They’re like, actual gods, aren't they? Gods aren’t supposed to die.”

“I guess not,” you say, although that feels wrong, something about that feels off. You don’t entirely know why. “It just seems kinda say, thinkin’ about these kids we ain’t ever gonna meet, who were lifted up as heroes when they were, shit, our age.”

“Yeah,” he says, cracks a single eye to regard you. It glimmers ruby red in the ugly light that emanates from the street lamp outside. “It kinda does, huh?”

You don’t know how to respond to that, so you don’t, not really, just shrug again.

Dave sighs, although he must be half-asleep now, face mashed into the pillow. He grabs your hand under the covers, drags it close to his chest, and doesn’t say goodnight.

You lie in the dark, heart thrumming, too aware of your fingers intertwined, and it’s another forty minutes before you finally think to close your eyes.

You’re the one who drives home, with Dave all curled up in the front seat, head pillowed on his arms and feet all tucked up under him like he’s some kind of pretzel. You’d laugh if a part of you weren’t so deeply endeared.

You prefer driving at night anyway, the low rumble of the car on empty miles of road, all laid out before you in a clean, straight line. There’s nothing out here except for the two of you, and you wish, just for a second, that you could pull the car over, maybe take a beat, let this moment last a lifetime.

But you can’t.

So you don’t, and you drive, and you ache, and you think, “I have to let him go.”

Dave kisses you over the center console of his car and you don’t have to ask, and you inhale your own spit, choke on surprise.

“Jesus, dude,” he laughs, shoving you back and away. “Don’t fucking puke on my car. Or me, actually. I’d never kiss you again, gross.”

“If I did you’d like it and thank me for it,” you sneer, and then, because you know he hates it, you reach back, hooking your hands onto the roof, and climb out the open window, muddy shoes on his dirty car seat.

“Dirk, you piece of shit -”

You laugh, flip him off, and scramble to get your back out of his car as he turns off the engine and comes crawling after you.

Your dreams come in fits and bursts, a scrambled mosaic in red and blue, and you wake up clutching your chest, dragging air in through desperate gulps, soaked in sweat from head to toe, and you are not afraid.

And that’s the worst part of all of it, when you wake up, shaking from head to toe, something like loss sitting heavy in your chest, a sense of calm that couldn’t possibly belong to you. Your fingers, frigid with cold, wipe your face clean, and you do not get up to shower, don’t risk the ire, know it isn’t worth it.

But you do open your phone, hover over Dave’s name for a moment, consider it carefully before dropping it back on the bedside table and rolling away.

You can’t.

You couldn’t do that, not to him.

He wakes you up from a dream that drains the blood from the tips of your fingers and you start, lash out before realizing it’s just -

Dave, it’s just Dave, holding the blade of your sword away from his face, eyes wide and red and brows up in his hairline.

“Shit,” you say, scramble upright, ease his hand free and dismiss your blade back to the dex. “Shit, fuck, Dave, I -”

Dave stares down at the slice across his palm for a long moment, doesn’t say anything, and you grimace when he wipes it against his pajama pants. “It’s cool. It’s not that bad.”

“Not bad my left goddamn foot,” you hiss, drag him into his bathroom so you can clean it. You’re lucky, you think, that you carry gauze now, shit, what did you _do_?

“I’m surprised I caught it,” is all he says, sitting on the toilet.

“I’m sorry,” you tell him, face pressed to his knee. “Fuck, I’m so sorry.”

“I’m fine, dude,” he says softly, tips your head up to brush a damp piece of hair away from his face. “Are you?”

And fuck if you don’t just. Shatter.

“Come on,” he whispers, takes you by the wrist, pulls you gentle as can be, so soft, so unlike him that you can’t find anything snide to say.

You never sleep in his bed at home, a boundary you’re not sure either of you are completely ready to cross, not with that clock ticking in the back of your heads.

You let him tuck an arm behind your head, careful, gentle, and do not thank him, just screw your eyes shut tight and try not to dream.

  
He doesn’t tell his parents, and the scar heals in an uneven line across the center of his palm.

Dave confesses the truth to you at the end of June, that he was also accepted into a school in New York, a private college in upper New Derse, run out of the oldest structure still standing from the fifth age.

“New York,” you repeat in a hollow voice. You should be happy for him. You should tell him you’re happy for him.

“It’s just a backup,” he says with a shrug, selfish, like it doesn’t matter at all. “I mean don’t get me wrong, it’s a good fucking school, they’ve got a fuck ton of connections out that way, I did wonder -” He stops, presses his lips into a thin line. “It doesn’t matter.”

“You have family in New York,” you say, like it does.

“Yeah,” he sighs, drags a hand back through his hair, irate or stressed or a hundred other fucking things. He’s been like this, lately. You hate it. You hate feeling so far away. “We’re going to look during - when I go back.”

You stare at him, and your face is a frozen mask so cold it almost feels alien to you. “When.” It’s not a question.

Dave winces, an ugly thing, and refuses to look at you, spins his computer chair away so he doesn’t have to try. “Next week,” he says simply, staring at the wall.

“Great,” you say.

“I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d freak out -”

“No, of course not,” you say, already standing.

“Dirk -”

“It’s fine,” you say, but you’re already moving, you’re already across the room with your hand on the door, and the last thing you hear before you close it behind you is your name, something like a plea.

Your mother takes you to the mall when it becomes clear you grew again, when you don’t have anything to wear for the duration of your stay at the lake house, and you keep your head turned out the window, don’t want to see her red knuckles or how the wind blows her usually pin-straight hair around her head like a large white cloud.

“You didn’t have to take me,” you say, against your better judgment. You don’t want to look at her. “I can drive now.”

“I know that,” she says. Her voice is even, monotone as yours ever has been. It’s a trait you share that you’re certain neither of you like.

“You don’t have to do everything he says,” you continue, maybe because you hate yourself, or maybe because you’re mad at Dave, mad that he does everything asked of him, even if it’s not what he wants.

It probably doesn’t matter.

“I mean, it’s not like he can do anything to either of us at this point that he hasn’t done already. What’s the fucking point anymore.”

“Dietrich,” she says, so suddenly strict. She doesn’t pull over, because she’s not the kind of person who is affected by shit like that, but you know now, that you’ve made her angry, and you do look at her then, if only because it’s more than you’re used to getting. Her hands are tight on the wheel, knuckles white.

“I think I hate him,” you tell her, and finally, finally, she looks at you.

Your mother, with her green, green eyes (like fire, like the sun), who has your nose and thin lips, always pressed so tight together. “Dirk,” she says. It sounds like a plea.

It’s unbearable.

You turn away, and don’t apologize.

You stand on a beach in Corpus Christi and the hair sticks up on your arms, soaked in sweat and a chill rolling through you like an ocean wave.

It’s just a dream, you think. Your fingers burn, a buzzing sensation as they come back to life, or,

die, or

or die, all over again.

It’s just a dream.

It’s the beginning of July when you hold a bladekind, a real honest to god strife specibus in your hands, not just the practice shit they hand out in fencing, and you stare at it like the person who gave it to you is fucking nuts.

In a way, you guess he is.

“Uh,” you say. Flounder.

“It’s tradition,” your father says. He no longer towers over you, and you can’t remember when that changed. There is always an air to him, like he knows something you don’t. You often wonder if that’s what it’s like for everyone who heads a church of Light. You’re not really sure. His eyes are cruel and violet as they’ve ever been. You think, standing there, that you don’t love him.

“I’m not sixteen,” you say, but it comes choked, fear strangling you. Not of the specibus, though perhaps you should be, a space for a weapon, something you never expected to need, something you definitely shouldn’t need. It’s weird, the way it fits so easily into the empty slot, like a whole in your chest you never realized was there until someone pointed it out. To have it filled is still, in a way, suffocating.

Your father looks annoyed at that, and when he hands you a sword, holy fuck a fucking SWORD, you nearly drop it in surprise. “A boy your age should be capable of handling a weapon - a real damn weapon. You should be thankful.”

And then he walks away, and you stand in the middle of your living room and think, “What the fuck am I supposed to do with this?”

  
You sit in your room flicking the sword in and out of your dex, and there is a thrill to it, a sense of satisfaction when it comes so easily to you.

A part of you knows this is a bad idea.

A part of you can’t wait to show Dave.

You stand in the rarely used backyard with a sword and it is the most natural thing in the world. It’s heavy in your hands, and you think, “I could really get hurt with this thing.”

You think, “I could probably figure this out on my own.”

You think, “I don’t know why I said yes.”

Your father says, “Do it again.”

  
You dress your own wounds in the bathroom and there is bitter satisfaction in the way the alcohol stings your knuckles. You wince as you bandage your wrist, tug just tight enough that it makes you ache.

You think, “It’s already too easy.”

Dave comes home from Old Dersetown with a bruise on his jaw and his cousin Rosalind Lalonde on his arm.

“Rose is staying with us this month,” he says simply, though you didn’t ask, but there is challenge in the way his mouth is pressed thin, jaw clenched so hard you can see it jump.

You want to ask, want to tug off his shades and just _see_ -

But you know he won’t let you, so all you can do is nod, feel your guts twisting together uselessly.

You spend the rest of the week following after them, from the backyard barbeque his dad insists on hosting to the pond on the east side of town, where Dave insists on swimming.

“Can’t we go to the local pool,” you gripe.

“No,” he says, with this nasty look on his face you can’t quite parse.

You hate it.

You don’t mind Rose though, not half as much as you want to, two years older than Dave and just as tall. She slips off her shirt and you follow a bruise from the top of her shoulder down one arm until it fades at the elbow. Her knuckles are red, just like Dave’s. You count the bruises until she catches you staring, make eye contact with her, perhaps for the first time. Rose is no less bright than Dave, and her eyes are full of challenge, but you don’t need to say anything, just turn your head and look away.

Dave kisses you the moment Rose leaves the room, any time she leaves the room, and you’d be lying if you said you didn’t take advantage of that, rocking up an inch on your heels as he dips towards you, lips bumping and laughs exchanged between breaths.

His fingers are chilly on your face, and yours are rough, snagging his shirt.

“Stop,” you snicker, drop hard on your heels, pull him with you.

“Fuck you,” he huffs, wobbling a little. “Why are you so fucking short?”

“You’re a behemoth,” you snort. “That ain’t my fault. ‘Sides, I’m gonna be taller’n you. Just wait.”

“You’re so full of shit,” he says, and then he talks you backwards onto the bed and drops the whole of his body against you.

“Dave is moving in October,” Rose says when he leaves to shower, the Thursday before her flight.

She cuts an intimidating figure, standing in the doorway, long blonde hair plaited over her shoulder (her father won’t let her cut it, Dave told you, like it was a secret) and you think it doesn’t suit her, certainly doesn’t suit the elegant fold of her arms or how, when she looks down at you, you feel twice as small.

She reminds you too much of your father, you think, and feel guilty for it.

“I know that,” you say simply. You’re uncomfortable but trying not to let it show, rearranging the books on Dave’s shelves in alphabetical order (again). “I’d have to be stupid not to, so if you have a point here, I’m missing it.”

“I wonder,” she begins around a sigh, but then Dave’s door swings open, and you don’t get to find out what it is, exactly, she wonders at all.

Dave drives her to the airport with you in tow, and his hands are shaking as he passes her luggage over to you.

“It’s alright,” she says, a single touch to the shoulder, familiar yet hesitant. Uncomfortable. “I’ll call when I land.” She looks at you, and you think she considers saying something else. Then, without a word more, she takes her bag from you, turns on her heel and heads toward the gate.

“Holy fuck,” Dave breathes, standing in the middle of your room, holding your sword before him with a look of awe.

“Yeah,” you say sheepishly, don’t know why you feel so ashamed.

He turns to look at you, mouth still flapping. “I don’t have a permit for this.”

“Neither do I.” You attempt a smile but it comes out lemon sour, and the second attempt feels worse than the first.

“But it feels,” he murmurs, flicking it in and out of your borrowed deck.

“Right,” you agree.

“Yeah.” He doesn’t look afraid, like you thought he might, holding it before him. Then he frowns, rolls it over his wrist to test the weight. “Is this why your hands are all fucked up?”

Your stomach clenches and you feel that sense of shame again. “It’s just practice,” you say, too quick. “Still a li’l heavier for me than it probably should be. I just need some more work.”

A beat between you, the tick of a clock. With Dave, time never seems to move the way it should.

“Dirk,” he says softly.

“I know,” you say, shrug.

Dave puts the sword on your desk and walks forward, cups your face in his hands. He doesn’t have calluses on his fingertips like you, probably never will. He tips your face up so you have to look him in the eye, and you feel stupidly, foolishly in love. “I’m sorry.”

You could forget, in this moment, why he could ever be sorry about anything at all, but you smile again, easy as anything, and it doesn’t hurt half as much. “It’s alright,” you say, turn your head to kiss his palm, hold it there against your lips. “It’s alright.”

The two of you lay side by side in Dave’s messy twin bed and his parents know you’re not pale.

“Oh my god,” he says.

You make a soft, thoughtful noise, knees still aching, nose sore from where he accidentally elbowed you. You’re not unhappy.

“Oh my fucking gods,” Dave says again.

“Could have been worse,” you offer. Your eyes drift to the plastic stars stuck on the ceiling.

“I’m going to shove you off the bed,” he says with zero conviction.

You snort. “I’d like to see you try.”

Neither of you move.

When Dave says, “Oh my gods,” for the fifth time in a row, you are the one who shoves him off the bed.

You are permitted your father’s old truck on a hot day in August. You wipe the blood from your nose and say, “Thanks,” in a mechanical tone as you take the keys and head outside.

You are too old to cry.

You are too old to cry and you sit in your brand new truck, baby blue and rusted around the edges, press your face to the wheel, and breathe in heavy from your bruised but unbroken nose.

It really shouldn’t be a surprise when the first place you drive is Dave’s house.

You sit on the street for a long moment, cleaning up your face and trying not to look at yourself in the rearview mirror. When did you start looking so bitter? When did you get so tired?

“Hi,” he says, breathless when he finally answers, after you mash the doorbell twelve times in a row. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Interrupting your J.O. session,” you monotone, shoving past him and heading down the stairs. “C’mon, I’ll help you go over the housing agreement one more time.”

Dave picks you up every day at the same time, 10:14 on the dot, and you never fail to take that extra six minutes, drag on your shoes and grab your backpack, even though you never really need it.

You don’t know why he bothers, why he’s wasting all his spare time to be with you, and you are embarrassed to see him waiting with his ass parked on the corner of the hood, smoking a cigarette.

You come to a stop at the bottom of your stairs, frowning. “What are you doing.”

“New hobby,” he drawls, taking a drag and blowing out a cloud of smoke. He’s dramatic, your stupid asshole Dave, and that couldn’t be clearer than now, when he grins in reply to the way you scowl.

“It’s a piss poor fucking hobby,” you snap, jerk the passenger door open.

“Rollin’ my eyes, Dirk,” he sneers, mean as ever. He drops down with ease, grabs you around the wrist before you can protest. “Come on, c’mere, I’ll show you how. Just - don’t tell my fucking mom.”

“I’m not telling your mom,” you grumble, and then you let him hand you his pack of Pall Malls.

“Do you ever wonder if they’re actually your parents?”

You actually do laugh at that, low and mean, fuck, you’re getting so mean, and you roll over on the blanket to look at him. “Is that a serious question?”

He takes a drag, smoke held between two slim fingers, and you watch his lips on the exhale. “Why wouldn’t it be? They don’t treat you like much of anything.”

You consider that, consider him, think about the constant leer of disappointment in your father’s eyes, how your mother’s gaze always seems to skate right over you.

“I think I like them better this way,” you say simply. Then you pluck the cigarette from his lips and bring it to yours.

He lets out a half-yelp, but his arm has wrapped around your stomach before you can stop him. He drags you down, both of you laughing, fuck, dude, watch it, you’re gonna burn a hole --

You get your third set of stitches alone in a hospital room and you don’t wince when they numb your wrist, don’t bother watching for how interesting you truly think it is. They always hate when you look.

You repeat the story, over and over, rewind, repeat. “I tripped, I was in the shed and I tripped, scratched myself up on a nail, stupid, really, should have been more careful.”

An amateur mistake, truly, you’ll admit it, you should have blocked better, you should have been ready when he swung from the right, but you weren’t paying attention, were you?

Idiot.

Foolish fucking idiot.

“What if I took you with me?” he says on the last Sunday of the month, expression tight around the corners and mouth so easily displeased.

“I’m not sixteen,” is all you can say, simple as anything, easy as breathing. You can hardly say you didn’t think of it, because you did, but it’s statistically unlikely that he won’t come to regret that decision. That he won’t regret you. You brush the hair away from his forehead and think about how much you like the shape of his nose. “I hardly think we need to add kidnapping to your bucket list, Dave.”

He pushes your hand away, and he’s not smiling. “Why do you do that?”

You frown, stare at his eyes. You see them so rarely now, with his oscillating shades in various shapes and sizes, like he just can’t settle. “Do what?”

He rolls up onto his elbow, expression serious now, eyes dark. “Joke about that shit. Your shit. Like you think it’s okay.”

Uh.

“I never said it was okay,” you say slowly. You two fight often, sure, but never about this, never about how things are for you. You always assumed that line was clear.

“But you do brush it off,” he presses. He reaches for you, stops, and your chest aches. “You think I want to leave you here?”

You laugh, caustic and cruel. “You think you have a choice?” You scoff. “Please, as if I would dare stand between the great David Strider and his passion.” You roll to your feet to get away from his platitudes before they begin. You can only take so many sorries.

“You’re sayin’ it like a joke, but I know you mean it, which actually makes it worse,” he points out.

“Not shit I mean it,” you laugh, drag a hand back through your hair. Your fingers stick to the gel-smoothed spikes. “Fuck’s sake, dude, I want you to be happy.”

“I can’t be fucking happy when I know you’re gonna be here gettin’ your shit knocked around.” And he’s so mad, he’s desperate, anguish so clearly written right where you can see it.

“I have a car, don’t I?” you offer, lamely.

He sneers. “How much good’s that car gonna do you on the weekends? Gonna help you with your homework? Gonna be around to keep you from sleeping in?”

You make a face, huff. “I don’t sleep in.”

“You don’t sleep at _all_!” he shouts, throwing his hands up. “It’s a fucking wonder you can even make it through first period anymore!”

You swallow bile, feel that quiet anger building in your chest. “I can handle my own shit.”

“No the fuck you can’t!”

You can’t be mad at Dave.

You can’t be mad at him, even as it burns through you, all-consuming fury you can just barely contain. “I’ve been doing just fine on my own for years,” you say, acid dripping from every word. “I don’t need you.”

Dave freezes, goes so still you don’t even think he’s breathing. The air stagnates, just for a moment, like time has ceased to be. “Say it again,” he murmurs, soft enough you almost miss it.

You swallow again, hands flexing. “What?”

He sits up slowly, calmly. “Say it fucking louder,” he drawls. A muscle in his jaw twitches. “If you mean it so much, say it so I can fuckin’ hear you.”

“I don’t,” you bite out, nails digging into your palms, teeth grit to the point of pain. “Need. You.”

“Go home, Dirk,” he says, voice cold in a way you’ve never heard directed at you before. “If you ain’t need me at all. Go home.”

“I will,” you say primly, turning on your heel, shoulders stiff, spine rigid. “Because I don’t need you to fucking drive me anymore, neither.”

You slam the door closed behind you, and you do not - cannot - breathe, not even when you reach the truck.

You don’t talk on your first day of school, senior year.

You don’t talk on your first week, after.

You don’t see Strider, David, until the third week of September, and he’s waiting outside your house on the steps when you pull up into the doorway.

You freeze, unsure of what to do, let the car idle while you consider your options.

He doesn’t give you much room, because as soon as he sees it’s you, he hops up and strides towards the car.

You should be more afraid when he wrenches your door open, when he unbuckles your seatbelt and climbs inside, pushes until he’s straddling you, bent and looking over you in the most awkward way possible.

You’ve got a black eye. His nails are bitten raw.

“I’m so fucking sorry,” he says.

“Yeah,” you sigh. You’re tired. “Me too.”

And then he cups your face and kisses you, hard.

You don’t expect much from your senior year, least of all to be left alone. But the kids don’t seem interested in you any longer, fifteen with a scowl etched into your face, apathy like a shroud.

Dave is moving next month.

You’re going to be alone.

You don’t know what you’ll do, not really, but you decide, staring at the back of your teacher’s head, listening to her lecture about something you taught yourself over the summer, that you sure as shit ain’t waiting around here any longer than you have to, to find out.

“My parents would let you stay with them, if you asked,” he says, chin digging into your sternum.

He’s heavy as shit like this, upper half draped over your with an arm wiggled behind your back, but you would never tell him to move. Don’t want him to, besides.

“Mm, nah.” Your fingers are careful as you untangle strands of hair, gentle in a way you never are with anything or anyone else. It’s so easy, with Dave, to lose your razor edge, to let yourself go boneless beneath him, to pretend you’re just a normal kid with normal problems. “Can’t exactly destroy my dad’s image of the fearless community leader, now can I?”

“But he doesn’t deserve it,” he pushes gently. It frustrates you. He never used to push like this. Some days, you can’t figure out why. “ _You_ don’t deserve it.”

 _Yes, I do,_ sits at the edge of your lips, but you don’t - cant - say that, so you cup his cheek and raise your head to kiss him until he forgets the conversation happened at all.

You stand in the airport holding one of Dave’s bags over your shoulder while you watch him hug his parents. They’re going up next week to help him settle in, you know that, but you’re aware this is the last time you’ll see him in person for more than both of you are comfortable with.

His mom looks back you knowingly, gives a little wink before guiding her blubbering husband away towards the gift shop to buy Dave one of those stupid neck pillows.

He waits a beat longer before shoving his shades up into his hair and looking at you. “This is really fucked up,” he says.

“I dunno,” you say, stepping forward to hook your hands into his belt loops. “Kinda think it’s just how my life’s gotta play out. All the good shit gets left behind. Or at the very least,” you add, tugging him close enough to kiss, “it leaves me behind.”

“But I don’t want to,” he says, whisper soft. His hand curls into your shirt, and you don’t complain when his teeth dig into your lip.

“You will, once you get to know me,” you say dryly, and he socks you in the arm, light as he dares. A fucked up part of you misses the days when he didn’t pull his punches.

“I’m serious, Dirk,” he says, and you almost can’t bear to watch as his face falls apart. “I know you think this is just some kind of fucked up cosmic joke, but it’s not, it’s you fuckin’ life, and I don’t want to - Jesus, dude, don’t you care about yourself at all?”

“Course I do,” you snort. “What the fuck kind of question is that? Been lookin’ out for numero uno since day one, asshole. You’re just lucky you’re in my sphere of necessity.”

“Pretty sure it’s supposed to be a pyramid,” he tells you thoughtfully. “Or is that the nutritional chart?”

“I don’t fucking know, I skipped middle school health.” You can’t help the shitty little grin, and he can’t help return it.

Still, it’s short-lived as he glances at the departure board. “Listen, Dirk, I just wanted to tell you that I.” His ears tinge red, right there in the airport, and he reaches up to adjust his shades, realizes he’s not wearing them, drops it uselessly. “You’re my best friend,” he settles on.

A smile wars at the corner of your mouth. “I’m your only friend.”

“And you’re mine,” he mumbles, worrying at his bottom lip.

You reach up to,

You don’t know. To touch, feel, to hold.

You drop your hand. “It’s okay,” you say instead, pushing his bag into his arms, away from you. “This shit is important. You’ll see me again, anyway.”

Dave doesn’t feel the same way, you can tell, of course he fucking doesn’t, obstinate shithead, and he holds your hand like he think you’ll disappear until the minute he has to cross the gate.

Your father hits the ground hard on a Thursday afternoon.

You hear a crack as his elbow knocks the edge of the patio, red blooming across the sleeve of his shirt.

You can’t help the way your jaw clenches, can’t control the wild beat of your heart, can’t control the squeak of your teeth as they grind down, can’t control the way your hands shake, even though you don’t want them to.

You aren’t afraid.

Your wrist still stings, and you can feel the blood still gushing, feel it trickle down your thumb.

You aren’t afraid.

You aren’t afraid of him because you shouldn’t be, nearly as tall as him, aren’t you, and you can handle a sword, sure, of course.

Your hands shake.

He stares, violet eyes, stern face, hair more white now than shiny salt and pepper it’s been for as long as you can remember, and your hands shake.

Dave calls you every sight, for those first two weeks. Long past your dinner time, when you can sneak out into the car where you sit for hours, staring blankly at your house. Your fingers itch for a cigarette, and you recognize the habit is bad, but it reminds you of him, and you don’t really care to stop, besides.

“It’s great,” he says again. He says it almost every day, and you run out of ways to say, “that’s good,” after the first three days.

It’s better, you think, than when he says, “I miss you.”

There’s an unbearable guilt that holds itself deep in the center of you. It would be easier, sometimes, if he didn’t know you at all.

“I was going to come home for Holy Week,” he says on a Tuesday, and you hear his steps creak on hardwood as he paces his room, restless, relentless. He’s never been good at sitting still.

You sit in your car with the seat leaned all the way back, feet on the dashboard. “I’m sensing a but,” you say, try not to sound cold, or at least not half as shitty as usual.

It’s a lot harder than you think it’ll be.

“Dirk,” he starts, stops. You think he sounds guilty, can tell he doesn’t want to tell you, not really.

Good.

You can hear the way he agonizes, even though he doesn’t speak, an inhalation, anxiety in the creak of the floorboards, feet pacing back and forth.

You nearly feel bad.

“Just spit it out,” you sigh.

“My aunt invited me back to New York,” he tells you. “For, for the holiday.”

Your teeth dig into the inside of your cheek. You aren’t going to be mad at him. “Okay.”

There, quick and easy. Look at you go, agreeable, not bitter at all.

“My parents are comin’ out too,” he says in one big rush of air. “They really want me to take a look at that fuckin’ school again, shit’s ridiculous, as if my life’s not already a joke, what would I even do in New Derse? It’s just a bunch of stuck up humans and awkward carapacians. I mean sure, save ‘em a pretty penny, wouldn’t it, and my aunt, she - well. It’s fucking dumb. I’d freeze to death, anyway, their winters are brutal as shit, dude.”

“You already moved across the country in one direction,” you say, don’t mean to. It slips out before you can stop it, and you hate yourself a little bit for it.

“Dirk -”

“It’s fine,” you say.

It doesn’t matter.

Jealousy is useless. You are aware, to a point, that it is unfounded, as well. It’s not like he’s got much in the way of a real family to start, does he, and

shit. Fuck, you’re doing it again.

“Rose,” he starts, hedges around the subject. It’s a touchy one, for both of you, for different reasons. “She - I can’t just say no.”

“You don’t think she can handle herself?” you ask, though you shouldn’t.

“Of course she can,” he says. “That’s what I’m worried about. It’s - shit, Dirk, I can’t leave her there.”

“Yeah,” you say, a muscle in your jaw jumping, count the stitches that trail from the base of your thumb down to your wrist. “Couldn’t have that, could we?”

“Dirk, Christ,” he mutters. “You know, I tried -”

“Oh, we all know how hard you tried,” you sigh. You stare at the footprints so clearly caked in dried mud, on the dash of the passenger’s side. Your chest aches. “It isn’t your fault.”

It’s mine.

“I didn’t say -”

“You didn’t have to,” you say, but it isn’t kind, and you both know it.

“Dirk,” he whispers, but his voice is harsh now, deadly quiet.

“That’s my fucking name, ain’t it,” you drawl.

You hang up on him.

Dreams drift across your mind to the beat of a drum, cold blue that oozes into lava red, green and orange and back again.

You sleep, or you don’t, or you do, and you dream.

It takes a week, after, for you to make up.

You’re not particularly good at apologizing, and he’s never been good at communicating. So quick to shut down, the both of you. So quick to shovel blame, or internalize. The two of you are, by medical definition, a shit show.

When he does call (and of course he caves first, of course, as if you could ever be so good), you’re in the middle of class, stand so abruptly you nearly knock your desk over, are out in the hall before your teacher can ask.

“I’m sorry,” you spit, bitter and poisonous as you’ve always been, but desperate, so desperate for him to understand.

“Yeah,” he says around a sigh, a strained little laugh. “Me too. I shouldn’t - fuck, dude, you’re my best friend.”

“Kinda hope I’d count for more,” you snort softly.

“Well sure,” he drawls, but you can hear the way it sticks in his throat. “You’re my BFF, aren’t you?”

“Never got me a necklace to prove it, you cheap piece of shit,” you say, but your mouth is trying very hard not to smile. 

He drifts from you in bits and pieces, a missed call here, a “sorry, I was busy,” there. You worry, though not necessarily about his health. You worry he doesn’t like you, you worry that you’ve become a nuisance, a chore.

That he only talks to you because he feels like he has to, that he’s got better shit to do.

(You know he does, really, and that almost makes it worse.)

You never cared before, what people thought about you. You spent a very large portion of your life being perfectly content with existing in a passive state.

But Dave.

It always comes back to Dave.

The dreams continue to blur and shift into an unavoidable mess of color, pain that builds at the base of your sternum, something hot and tinted copper that bubbles free from your lips. When you wake, your fingers are numb, and you are covered in a layer of sweat so thick your sheets are damp.

It’s an easy choice, then, to begin avoiding sleep altogether.

Dave doesn’t call, all of Holy Week, and though you won’t admit it, your stomach turns in knots, chest aching, anxiety burning through you until your sleeplessness compounds, until you cannot focus, can’t think, and damn near fall apart in the process.

When he does call you, it’s a soft tone to his voice. Nerves, maybe a touch of grief. “I have something to tell you, but I don’t want you to be mad about it.”

There’s very little in your life right now, you think, that doesn’t make you mad. “Shoot,” you say, voice hollow, tired. You’re always so damn tired.

“Rose’s mom - my aunt, she’s.” He goes quiet, lets loose a shaky breath. It’s an uncomfortable silence, and your ears ring briefly, in the interim. You hear him open his mouth, cough wetly, stop again.

You wait.

“It’s fine, honestly,” he says after maybe two minutes. Definitely a long streak. “I don’t mind, I guess. I mean shit, I would have really liked - I guess it doesn’t matter where you get the degree as long as you don’t waste it, right?” He speaks in a rush, doesn’t give you room to answer. “I mean long-term plans be damned maybe but sure fine why the fuck now, I’m already pretty much a walking clown just slap a nose on me and call me - fuck. Dirk, quick, give me a clown name.”

“You’re deflecting,” you say, but you’re not happy. Despite everything, you’re not sure you’ve ever truly been happy about any of this at all.

“It’s a full ride,” he offers weakly. “My parents put it away before they. I mean my real, shit, they uh.”

You swallow. “Dave.”

“My aunt was the only one who. Well she should have fucking told me, for starters.”

“Yeah,” you say. You pop the knuckles on your right hand. “That’s. It’s good.”

“I guess?” There’s a soft thump thump as his head hits the back of his bunk. “Jesus.”

“Guess that means I ain’t visiting this summer, after all,” you offer, half a drawl.

“No, I - look, I can, I don’t have to - Dirk, if you’re askin’, if it’s you, I -”

Fuck.

This isn’t what you _want_.

“No,” you blurt, heart in your throat.

You promised yourself you wouldn’t.

You promised.

“Fuck no.”

“Shit,” he says, and he laughs, but it is fragmentary at best. “Shit, Dirk. What am I supposed to do? How the fuck am I supposed to know what’s - Christ, dude, it’s all a pile of horse feces.”

You close your eyes. Inhale, exhale. Press your thumb to your middle finger and don’t grind your teeth. “I know,” you say, though you don’t. You don’t fucking know. Your chest aches, your eyes burn at the corners. You are so, so desperately tired. “I’m sorry.”

What else can you say? What else is there to fucking say.

Blood seeps from your nose.

You dream it oozes from your fingertips.

The air smells like sulfur, then desert smog.

You dream, and then you don’t.

Your father says, “Get up. Do it again.”

Dave moves back across the country in the opposite direction and this time you don’t see him off in an airport, or see him off at all. He texts you when he lands, but you don’t know what to say. You send a shades emoji. He sends one back.

You wait for him to call, that first week. When he doesn’t, you don’t call him.

You feel anger, first, then something like disappointment, maybe in Dave, maybe in yourself.

Perhaps one day you will recognize the feeling of being alone, and perhaps one day you will understand that your way of dealing with this is not necessarily healthy.

Or maybe not, you think, throwing your phone down on the bed.

You can’t beg him, please. You can’t call his parents to ask, god fucking forbid.

You wait.

You finally sleep.

You wait one week, then two.

You are alone.

“Dirk, gods, I missed the sound of your voice,” he says, laughter bright, like nothing has changed, like he didn’t ghost you, like you haven’t been waiting, like you haven’t been alone.

It’s your birthday.

You know he remembered, of course, because he’s calling.

“I can’t really talk right now,” you say, though you’re not necessarily distracted. Just busy. You tuck the phone against your ear and shoulder so you can zip your suitcase. “You didn’t have to call.”

Dave flounders for a second, voice catching. Then, “Yes, I did, shithead. It’s your birthday.”

“I know that,” you mutter, grabbing your backpack, shoving your only sweater into the open pocket before hoisting it over your shoulder. “I can read a calendar, y’know.”

“Okay,” he says slowly, but you can feel how much he doesn’t like it, how quickly he tenses, how suspicious he becomes. “Something’s wrong. What is it?”

“Nothing,” you spit, bite the inside of your cheek, ignore how raw the skin is. “If it was, don’t you think you’d be the first goddamn person I’d run to? I couldn’t possibly handle it myself, you’ve made that damn well clear.”

Shit.

Scratch, rewind.

“Listen, Dave, I shouldn’t - now isn’t really -”

Too late.

“Dirk, we ain’t talked in nearin’ on two weeks and I finally get the chance and you’re shitting all over it?”

Fuck.

“Whose fucking fault is that,” you say, though you don’t mean to, shit, that’s not what you wanted to say, that’s not how you wanted this to go.

“Wow.” He laughs, but it’s the ugliest sound in the world. “Is this how it’s gonna be with us? Every fuckin’ time? You want me to apologize again or are you too good for that?”

You do not say, “you’re the one who left me here.” Your heart couldn’t fucking bear it.

“I don’t have time for this,” you say instead.

“Make time,” Dave says. He’s angry at you, and you could nearly laugh, though you aren’t happy. It’s the first time you’ve spoken in weeks and you’ve made him fucking angry at you. Lucky for you, he’s a conveniently easy switch to flip. “C’mon, Dirk, I promise, I ain’t got anything else going on right now. Just - just talk to me.”

It’s so sincere, his plea, you could just

But you can’t.

So you don’t.

“It’s -” You pinch the bridge of your nose, know this decision will kill any chance you have of an apology later. “It’s not a good time.”

Take a deep breath, wrench your door open and head downstairs, one heavy thud at a time.

“I am a person with feelings, y’know,” Dave says, but it feels tinny, far away. “You can’t just jerk me around like this, dude, we’re supposed to be - what ever happened to being my only friend, huh?”

You see your mother before you see your father, and it is only because you know this is the last time you’ll see them at all that you finally give pause. “I’ll call you back,” you say quickly.

You don’t get to apologize.

And then you don’t get to call him back, either, phone crunched dead beneath someone else’s boot.

  
You should go to the doctor you think, the corner of your mind still clutching your strife specibus, left hand shaking, the edge of your barely healed scar aching, ACHING.

You packed up the rest of your shit into the truck last week, and you clean off your face in a gas station bathroom thirty miles from what used to be your home, nose too clogged to smell the piss.

It’s raining, your first day in New Houston, and when you walk outside into the thick soupy air, you finally feel like you can breathe. You feel

Not whole, exactly.

But _more_ , staring out at the skyline and thinking, holy shit.

You’re free.

Nothing After feels particularly interesting. You’re used to being alone now, was before. Can handle it again. It almost feels like you’re going through the motions, necessity layered with a lack of interest, like your only goal is to get ready for

You don’t know.

You don’t know.

You get a job, under the table at an auto shop, and don’t complain about the pay (sixteen is technically old enough to work, technically a lot of things, but you don’t have a proper adult ID and you definitely don’t have a work permit). The owner, Ron, looks at you like you’re the shit smeared to the bottom of his shoe. He also lets you sleep in the office without a word while you look for a place, and he tucks away lunches with your name scrawled across the top in the back of the fridge so none of the other employees get jealous.

No one ever asks where you’re from.

You never tell them.

You get an apartment, then a new phone. Your thumb hovers over the contact list and you wish, not for the first time, that you had committed the number to memory. Any number to memory. It would have been so easy for someone like you, but you didn’t think. You never think.

It becomes something that haunts you, a level of regret you cannot take back, an ache right through the center of you that burns like acid.

Idiot.

You’re an idiot.

You work but nothing makes you happy, and you sleep but all it does is lead to the dreams.

They’re more bearable now, when you wake up alone on your bedroom floor, when you remember that there’s no one left to be mad at you for the sweat-soaked clothes or untidy hair.

You get a degree because you can, and because you’re capable, NHIT, respectable-ass shit, and then, like a fool, you leave.

You’re not yet eighteen, standing on the set of Acorn’s Shadow, and the only thing keeping you from losing it is the lock on your strife deck and the cup of coffee clenched in your fist.

Why did you think this was a good idea.

Why did they believe your fake fucking resume. Why did any of them listen to your hour long lecture on the historical significance of Betancourt in relationship to modern media.

Well.

You always were good at pretending, and it turns out you remember a lot more about those stupid books than you thought you would.

It’s a long day before you finally slink back onto campus, and it’s almost second nature now, climbing the lattice and crawling in through the window.

“Cheese and fucking crackers, Dirk, you look like shit!” your new roommate says cheerfully, and you flip her off half-heartedly as you sink onto your sleeping back on the floor.

She just laughs brightly and throws a pillow at your head.

You met Roxanne Lalonde in a church, your first week in town, a college student with curls that float around her face and hair a shade of gold that never seems to catch the light properly.

It isn’t as though you were drawn to the Church of Light so much as you knew they had one of the most comprehensive libraries in New Dersetown, and despite yourself, you were insatiably curious.

You ran into each other, quite literally, on your way to the same studying table.

The first thing you said to her was, “Ow.”

The first thing she said to you was, “Watch where you’re goin’ there, you fuckin’ pervert.”

She then proceeded to talk your ear off, quantum physics first, then multiverse theory when you didn’t ask her to stop.

She asked if you were student, you said no of course not, and she had said, “How the fuck did you get in here?”

And you think she liked your answer, because she smiled, then, so wide her face nearly split in two, and she said, “Do you want to go to a party?”

You had not, in fact, actually wanted to go to a party, but it wasn’t as though you had anything else going on, and you woke up the next morning on Roxy’s floor, with no idea where you were or how you got there.

What you do remember now is that you didn’t dream that night, and that you haven’t dreamt any night since you started crashing in her dorm.

“They’re going to find out I’m here eventually, y’know,” you say now, staring at the stickers stuck to the ceiling. It’s pretty childish, sure, but it reminds you of someone else. “Pretty sure they don’t like it when boys sneak into the girls’ dorm.”

“Pshy, that’s just in the movies,” she snorts, wriggling around until she reaches her mini fridge, rummaging inside. “You wanna sodie pop?”

“Would love a coke,” you say dryly.

“Har har, country boy,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I’ll give you a fanta if you promise to shut the fuck up and go to sleep for once.”

“You’re the one keeping me up,” you grouse, but you take the can, ice cold, when she offers it to you. “Thanks.”

It’s surprisingly easy, being nice to Roxy. You _want_ to be nice to her. You don’t know what it is about her, that draws you in so close, with her bright white smile (braces, too, but she gets aggressive when you point them out) and rose-pink cheeks. She is a sea of warmth and radiant light that burns so bright you can just hardly stand it, or wouldn’t, anyway, if she wasn’t just about the only person who didn’t care to know shit about who you are, or who you used to be.

Or if she does, she’s oddly quiet about it. But she doesn’t ask, and sure as shit doesn’t tell you anything about the way she grew up, though you know it’s tied to the Church of Light somehow. You’re not dumb enough to ask.

The problem with Roxy is not that she drinks, perhaps, but rather the amount she drinks, which you believe surpasses the recommended limit for someone her size.

It’s fine, of course.

You only have to carry her to the dorm two or three times a week, and her floormates become familiar with your face, though how much they truly tolerate your presence remains a mystery. You never stop to ask.

You drink shit awful coffee in a production office and rub your eyes with a hand, scratch at the edge of your chin. You’re almost certain that your body is trying desperately to grow facial hair. Be about damn time, anyhow, wouldn’t it.

“No,” you say, not for the first time today, “that wouldn’t get passed ,not even if you fuckin’ paid me. It just ain’t relevant to the story canon.”

You meet Roxy’s mentor and like him immediately, but not in a way that is nice nor, it turns out, particularly friendly at all.

But you do like him, with his big booming voice and twinkling green eyes. The mustache is near intolerable, but the jet black hair, peppered silver, draws you in.

It’s the first time you’ve felt so enamored, you think, in over two years.

  
“Gross,” Roxy says cheerfully, after you leave his office, two weeks later. “He’s old, Dirkleton.”

“He’s distinguished,” you say defensively, direct a scowl her way.

“You’re a freak,” she says, hand on your shoulder. Then she winks and drags you into a noogie.

  
You don’t tell her, when you finally approach the old man. It would be kissing and telling, for starters. Downright fucking mortifying, to end it.

It isn’t your proudest moment, either, and you’re damn well aware of it.

You almost shave Roxy’s ear clean off one night after a bad trip, a dream that worms its way past her imaginary shroud. It’s the first time in awhile, and the nightmare chokes you, forces all the air from your lungs and leaves you gasping.

Shaking someone’s shoulder is a reasonable action.

You forget, sometimes, that reasonable people shouldn’t sleep with their strife deck activated.

You’re both lucky, anyway, when the sword whizzes past her head and into the far wall.

She stares at you, eyes wide, mouth a perfect “O.”

“Sorry,” you rasp, groggy, scramble clumsily upright, reach for her, abort the motion, flounder. What the fuck were you thinking? What the fuck is WRONG with you? “Shit, Christ, Roxy, I’m so fucking sorry.”

“You have a strife specibus?” she whispers, like it’s a secret.

“I clearly shouldn’t,” you mutter, push yourself up to fetch the sword. “I wasn’t expecting to - I should have been more careful,” you tell her. “It won’t happen again.”

She’s quiet, and you think fuck, you’ve really done it now.

When you turn, however, there’s nothing but pity in her big, sad eyes. “Dirk,” she says, delicate and sweet, all askance and acceptance offered in the way she opens her arms.

“I know,” you say like a routine, sag into her embrace like you belong there.

And for a moment, you believe you do.

Roxy introduces you to her future boss and current benefactor with very little ceremony, like it’s not a big deal, like someone isn’t funding her entire education and soon to be career.

Which is why, when the current head of Skaianet comes strolling through the laboratory doors, you nearly fucking balk.

Everyone knows Jade English, who rose to the top of the food chain alongside the now infamous Dr. Harley, before surpassing him and becoming the leading scientist in her field. You hear she’s next in line for CEO, if she isn’t there already. You can’t imagine who’d have to die for that to come into fruition.

You find, despite your immediate intrigue, that she scares the hell out of you, from her wild hair, deep silvery grey that seems to move like a living thing, to the way her hands reach without prompting, the way she tips her head and smiles at you with too much amusement.

“Dirk Strider,” she crows, circling you like a shark while stroking her chin like a supervillain. “Now why does that name sound so familiar?”

“It shouldn’t,” you say. Don’t shift your feet uselessly, don’t give away any hint of vulnerability. “I’m nobody.”

“Oh nonsense, I’m sure it’ll come to me,” she says airily, flapping a hand your way. “All things do, eventually.”

You don’t. _Love_ the way she says that, bright green eyes that bore into your soul and grin like a wolf.

You understand in the following weeks why people compare her to the Witch.

“I don’t have time to work at the labs,” you tell Roxy, tearing your breakfast sandwich in half and handing it to her. You juggle the heavy script notes on one knee, and you’re trying to balance your coffee and Roxy’s textbook on the other. “I ain’t sayin’ they’re not great, and there’s definitely somethin’ to be said for their development of AI processing, but shit, Rox, I got a full time job.”

“You don’t even like your job,” she wheedles. 

“I assure you the money I am making now will fuel me for years to come. Somehow, I ain’t exactly worried about like or hate right now.”

“Boo, coward,” she says, but you see her bottom lip poke out, all the same.

“Shitty movies don’t produce themselves,” you tell her. “Eat your fucking ciabatta, Lalonde, ‘fore it gets cold.”

“Everything is cold,” she laments, but she takes a bite anyway. “New York winters suck major dick, dude. Just like you.”

You scowl, pull your scarf up a little higher around your neck. “Shut the fuck up.”

All she does is laugh at you.

The end of the month brings the departure of Roxy’s mentor from the picture, as he sets off on some gods awful world tour. You roll your eyes when he gives you a letter, don’t imagine for a moment you’ll be needing the address penned in sharp, careful letters on the outside corner. You’ve learned, in time, that it’s better to let these things go.

“I don’t think you should drink so much,” you tell Roxy on the Friday after her birthday, when she’s got her head in the toilet and her hair pulled back in an eye-searing scrunchy. You didn’t bother telling her your birthday was the day before. It didn’t matter, and you didn’t want anyone to know, besides.

Birthdays have never mattered, not for you. Just another uncomfortable day on the calendar.

“Boo, lame,” she groans. It echoes.

“I’m serious,” you press. She’s just barely a year older than you, Roxy, and you think if she keeps going like this, it could take a turn down, real fucking quick. “It ain’t fun, when you get like this. It’s not good for you.”

“I know,” she says, lifts her head to plop it up on the seat. Her eyes are glazed but no less pink, and she looks at you with more fondness than you are strictly comfortable with. “You know how you get those dreams sometimes?”

You go very still, swallow heavy. Trace the scars that line your fingers idly. Of course you do. As if you could ever think to forget. “Yeah,” you say, throat froggy. “Yeah, sure.”

“Yeah,” she says. It’s quiet a moment, and you wonder if she forgot what she was going to say. Then she slaps your leg, far too aggressive to be funny. “But I’ll keep you safe, Strider. We’re best friends. We always have been.”

It’s the blurry sentiment of a very drunk girl, but it makes you smile, regardless.

“Yeah, Roxy,” you mumble, reach out and tuck a loose hair behind her ear. “I know.”

Roxy gets you a hat for Candlenights, just one, and you laugh, hit her in the arm with it. “What the fuck is this?”

“Because you’re a brooo,” she drawls, snatching it away and jamming it onto your head. “And everyone knows that bros wear hats!”

You push her away, rip it off your head. “All this is going to do is ruin my fucking hair.”

“I was going to get you a hoodie,” she sighs, flopping back onto the floor. “But when I walked in and saw the hat, I just...” She shrugs, a quick bob of her shoulders against the wood. “Dunno. Just made me think of you.”

You soften then, bite the inside of your lip. Then you reach over, careful as anything when you take her hand, give it a tender squeeze. “Thank you.”

You mean it.

You finally see him again halfway through January, when your boss needs someone to go to the main office downtown, and you go pale white when he says the name, something you could almost forget, something you almost left behind.

You volunteer anyway, because you still have your truck, and because you were never brave enough to go on your own. The excuse is convenient, though you’re filled with a dread you cannot explain, all the same.

You’ve heard the rumors about him, of course. You know the kind of reputation that’s already beginning to trail after him, even among the staff working on Detective Pony. 

Still, you knew him well, once upon a time, and you feel calm as you reach his office on the fifth floor, in the far back corner where the windows actually face towards the ocean.

You don’t knock, because there’s no one there to stop you, and because he’s got to be expecting you now, must’ve gotten the call from the front desk, surely.

You expect his face to light up when you enter the room, figure shit, he should be happy, he should be excited you came all this way, that you managed to find each other again, after everything.

“Dirk,” he breathes, pushes himself up from his desk. He stares for an extraordinarily long moment, like he can just barely believe it’s you. Then he’s striding towards you, you stepping to meet him, his arm raising as if to reach for you, to reciprocate, a comfort, a familiar touch.

But then he doesn’t.

But then Dave touches your shoulder, holds you away and says, “Not right now, huh?” with a smile so pinched he looks like he ate a fucking lemon.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” you scoff, no filter, hollow voice, barely shorter than him now, and he flounders there, fingers tightening into your collarbone, a frown beginning to settle on that mouth.

For a second you see the Dave you grew up with, razor sharp and mean as anything. “Dirk, I can’t --”

“Can’t what? Greet an old friend?” you sneer, like a dick, push his hand off you. “Although at this point, I reckon you could near call me an old fling, huh?”

“You were never just a fucking fling and you know it,” he snaps.

“Do I?” You laugh, low and sardonic. “Seemed pretty fuckin’ content to lose contact after moving to New York, if the papers can say anything about you.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it!” he barks, face ugly now, just the way you used to like him best. You’re surprised he stops short of stomping his foot. “I wrote to you! I tried! You’re the one who skipped town without a word to anyone, to me!”

“And I wonder why that is,” you drawl. “With your surprise full fucking ride transfer to Dersetown, like none of your other plans mattered at all.”

“My parents looked for you!” he shouts, face red, hands flexing. “They even went to your fucking house, and your dad, he acted like you DIED, Dirk, what was I supposed to do?”

“May as well have,” you say, but it comes bitter.

He licks his lips, the two of you held apart now, barely two feet between you. “You disappeared. You didn’t tell me. Shit, Dirk, I really thought -”

“Because it didn’t matter!” And you’re both yelling now, aren’t you. “You never had time anymore, you didn’t need me hanging off your like that, you sure as shit didn’t act like it.”

“I was trying to save up to move -”

“Out with Rose, yes of course,” you drawl, rolling your eyes. “How could I forget your little gal pal? So fuckin’ happy the two of you found each other again, that must’ve been such a struggle.”

His face goes dark as he steps into your space, breath coming heavy. “She’s not - I don’t have to - FUCK you, Dirk Strider.”

“Gladly,” you sneer, wrapping your hands into his shirt as he pushes you back against a wall.

  
You fuck in his office, still half-clothed and clawing at each other. You push him against his desk hard enough the air goes out of him, and your teeth against his neck are cruel enough he curses.

He pays you back with rug burn on the elbows and a grip so tight around your wrist you’re surprised it doesn’t snap.

There’s a moment where he cups your face, a slip up, maybe, or an automatic response.

All you can do is fall apart.

It’s stupid, of course, that you miss him more now than you did before.

His reaction is predictable, anyway. You really should have seen it coming, hindsight 20/20 and all.

“That was a mistake,” he tells you anyway, lying on the floor and staring up at the ceiling.

You were supposed to be back by the end of the work day. You know that’s not going to happen.

“Why?” you ask. You don’t need to.

He licks his lips and you do like him better like this, disheveled and rude, shades displaced and pants untucked. “Because you’re -”

“A production assistant?” you say wryly.

“A kid,” he corrects, stern.

“So are you,” you scoff, trace the lines of his bookshelves on the far wall. He’s already got an award. You knew that already. “Can’t believe you have this all to yourself.”

“Dirk,” he tries.

“We could try,” you say, pathetic, a limp olive branch held before you.

“No,” he whispers. “We can’t.”

“Didn’t expect you to be this much of a coward,” you say instead.

“I have to think about my image now,” he says. “I’m not sure I -”

You roll up and away from him. “Oh, sure, that’s all it is for you now, ain’t it? That why you wanna change your name?”

He blanches, sits up on his elbow. “You know about that?”

You smile but it hurts, teeth grinding and lips thin. “Know almost everything about you, don’t I? Ain’t that cute?” you simper. “Takin’ your family’s name, leaving your no good fosters and friends all behind you. Sure as shit don’t matter now, do they.”

Why are you doing this.

What are you DOING.

His mouth flaps open and closed, and he staggers to his feet. “That’s not -”

“Not exactly like you’re still in love with me, are you?” you say, and regret everything. 

“What?” he says, face shattering open. It hurts. “Dirk, we - that was years ago, I -”

“Oh,” you say, feel your heart begin to crack in your chest like a living thing. When you laugh, it’s a little hysterical, mostly sour. “Yes. Of course.”

“That doesn’t mean I don’t -” he starts.

“Don’t you dare fucking say you care about me,” you say, livid and cold. You can’t breathe, or you can, or you don’t want to.

His shoulder sag, and he raises his hands, offers a smile. “Is that so hard to believe?”

“Why, so you can get pity points with your girlfriend?” You don’t know why you say it, except that you want him to hurt.

He scowls magnificently, the smile melting away like he smells fresh shit. “She’s not my fucking GIRLFRIEND, you piece of shit -”

“Reckon that explains why you’ll fuck anything that walks, doesn’t it,” you drawl, zipping up your pants, smoothing your shirt.

His lip curls, and he sniffs. “That’s bold, coming from you.”

It seems your own reputation precedes you.

“What is it, David?” you drawl, tipping your head. “Jealous of an old man?”

“Apparently not half as jealous as you are,” he snaps. “Comin’ in here, acting like this, like you can just barely stand how fucking happy I am. Just because I’m successful at something and you’re still the same shitty kid you’ve always been!”

Your jaw creaks and aches from your teeth grinding together. You don’t punch him in the face.

You should have.

You won’t think to regret what you say until later.

“Successful seems a bit of a stretch,” you say, and it comes out frosty, bitter cold. “How many dicks you have to suck to get this office, with no talent and half a degree?”

Dave looks like he’s been struck, and then all at once his expression goes blank, flat and even. “Get out,” he says quietly.

You stare.

“Get out!” he shouts, slamming his fist on his desk so hard a glass goes crashing to the floor.

“With pleasure,” you sneer, and then you turn, and you walk away.

You had to tell Roxy, eventually. It was inevitable, really, given that you’ve spent six months on her floor, six months steeped in each other’s bullshit.

You don’t think you breathe the entire time, still can’t breathe when it’s done, and she stares at you for a long, long time before folding you into her arms.

  
You finish Detective Pony. Don’t make it to the wrap party.

You are eighteen years old when you move back to New Houston, alone, maybe okay with it, and touching down is more than a fresh breath, it’s like coming home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please do not @ me I have just been thinking about this for a long while. In no way connected to anything else.  
> ps sorry i posted this instead of the other fic i just wrote this first and the other one is.... very last on a long list right now haha

**Author's Note:**

> This won't have a sequel, and stands alone because I guess it is, in a way, its own kind of prequel.


End file.
